Creating a Meaningful Name for Your Lightroom Classic Catalog

When working with clients in private training, and I’ve seen Lightroom Classic catalogs with all sorts of odd names. The most convoluted names are usually on catalogs that have been upgraded by Adobe during routine LrC updates. In the past Adobe used to add “-2” to the end of the catalog name when updating. Then a few years ago they switched to appending the name with the current LrC version, such as v-12 or v-13. Because of this catalogs that have been in use for years end up with names like “Lightroom Catalog-2-2-2-v13-v14”.

The easiest way to see the name of your catalog is to open your Catalog Settings (Mac: Lightroom > Catalog Settings, Win: Edit > Catalog Settings) and select the General tab. The name is on the first line named Location.

Open your catalog settings and choose the General tab: (Mac: Lightroom > Catalog Settings, Win: Edit > Catalog Settings)

In the past changing the name of a catalog had to be approached with caution because it was something that needed to be done in a convoluted way outside of Lightroom Classic. Now it’s simple, just choose File > Rename Catalog.

When the dialog opens, type the new name and click Rename. When you do, Lightroom closes and a popup message indicates the catalog was successfully renamed. Click OK on the popup and LrC will restart with the new catalog name. Rename Catalog has an additional option to rename the parent folder at the same time. Some people may find that useful but it isn’t necessary.

Choose File > Rename Catalog to open this dialog.

Having a meaningful catalog name probably isn’t important to many users because it doesn’t affect Lightroom Classic’s performance. But for those who want to change the name, it’s nice to know it’s now easy to do.