- [Narrator] Sometimes the Lightroom Classic user
will open the Lightroom Classic application
and not find what they expect.
They might see a completely empty catalog like this,
or they might notice some of their photos are missing
along with collections and edits.
If this happens to you, don't panic.
Lightroom did not sabotage your work behind your back.
Things will only go missing
when you have opened the wrong catalog.
And if something has gone missing,
then you're not viewing the catalog
where you did all of your work.
Remember Lightroom Classic can create multiple catalogs.
A catalog is just a file on your computer.
Sometimes you might unknowingly or accidentally
start a new catalog or open a really old one.
Let's review how you can determine
which catalog you have open.
The first thing I'm going to do
is toggle through the view options with the shift F,
so we can get back to the normal view.
While we're in the normal view,
we can see the name of the catalog
at the top of the frame here.
So this empty catalog I have open
is just simply called Lightroom catalog.
Next we can open the Lightroom Classic catalog settings.
On a Mac, that's found under the Lightroom classic menu.
On windows, you'll find it under the edit menu.
And in the catalog settings, in the general tab,
here at the top is the location
and the name of the catalog that we have open.
We could jump out to that
by clicking the show button from here.
This is the catalog that Lightroom automatically created
for me when I first launched the application
to start this course.
The catalog that we used throughout the course
is on my external photos drive,
not in my pictures folder like this one.
I recommend that you take a minute
to open the catalog settings and review the name
and location of your master catalog.
Write this information down somewhere
so if someday all of your hard work goes missing,
you won't panic.
If you don't have this information written down
and you don't remember where the catalog file is,
you can always search your computer for the
.lrcat extension right here.
This will find all the catalogs on your computer.
Look for the most recent modification date
and that should be your master.