Today’s Question: Do you have a recommendation for the location for a new Lightroom Classic catalog?
Tim’s Quick Answer: If you only need to work with Lightroom Classic on one computer, I recommend putting the catalog on the internal hard drive for performance and convenience. If you need to access your catalog from more than one computer I recommend putting the catalog on an external hard drive along with your photos.
More Detail: Generally speaking, I recommend keeping the Lightroom Classic catalog on the internal hard drive of your computer. This helps optimize performance, since an internal hard drive is generally going to be faster than an external hard drive (though not always!).
In addition, having the catalog on the internal hard drive ensures it is always available, so you can open the catalog and review photos and update metadata and more even if the source files aren’t available. For example, if you keep your photos on an external hard drive, you don’t even need to have that drive connected to the computer to work with many features in Lightroom Classic, provided the catalog is on the internal drive.
The primary reason I recommend putting the catalog on an external hard drive is if you want to be able to switch between more than one computer with that catalog. In that case I recommend keeping the catalog and photos together on the same external hard drive. That way you can simply move the hard drive between computers and open the catalog from that drive in Lightroom Classic. You just need to be sure that on both computers the hard drive is assigned the same drive letter (Windows) or volume label (Macintosh) so Lightroom Classic will find the drive and therefore the photos in the expected location on both computers.
