Change default catalog location for Lightroom, not Lightroom Classic

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
November 11, 2022
2 replies
5515 views

I can find ample instruction on how to move a Lightroom Classic catalog, but nothing on how to change the default location of the Lightroom catalog.

This is the issue: I've moved the Lightroom catalog (or Lightroom CC, or Lightroom Ecosystem, or whatever they want to call it today) to an external hard drive. I've opened the Lightroom app by clicking on that file, but when I close the app and click the Lightroom app itself to see if the app will look for the catalog in the new location, it simply recreates a partial catalog in the original location (which is under my /Pictures/ folder on my Mac). How can I change the default location for the Lightroom catalog? Note: I'm not looking to change where Creative Cloud downloads/stores the various Adobe apps.

macOS

This topic has been closed for replies.

ray_chan25901775

Adobe Employee

Thanks for reaching out!

Unlike Lightroom Classic, Lightroom (aka Lightroom CC) back up all the originals in the cloud. Any photo edits and changes to metadata in Lightroom automatically sync through the Cloud and appear on all your devices. Lightroom users no longer need to manage the catalogs as in Lightroom Classic. Lightroom stores the cache in /Users/<user>/Pictures/Lightroom Library.lrlibrary and recreates this file if the local cache does not exist.

Preferences in Lightroom:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/preferences.html

Sync photos and edits using Lightroom:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/how-to/make-photo-edits-all-devices.html

Timothy.Spear

Inspiring

@ray_chan25901775

That is a bad design. Many people have a reason to move the catalog to another location. I do not think you will get a complaint from those who are subscribing to the Lr cloud ecosystem about Lr managing the contents of the catalog. However, for many of us, having this on the C drive in a hard coded location is NOT a feature, and is overall crappy design or lazy programming.

Tim

bostonbostianAuthor

Participating Frequently

@Timothy.Spear Thank you for your time. Your help is much appreciated. And I agree 100%. Not having an option is not a feature. It's bad design.

Jim Wilde

Community Expert

You cannot officially change the location of the Lightroom local library. However, I understand that some users have managed to do this via symlinks, but I have no details about that.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

@Jim Wilde wrote:

You cannot officially change the location of the Lightroom local library. However, I understand that some users have managed to do this via symlinks, but I have no details about that.

Should be very simple. Move the library to where you want it, make a symbolic link and place this link in the default location. Make sure the link is named exactly the same as the original library. That's all.

I agree however that this should not be necessary. Lightroom should allow you to place the library elsewhere.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

bostonbostianAuthor

Participating Frequently

@JohanElzenga Thank you for your time. Your help is much appreciated.

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