Organize your photos

Photo management is kept to a minimum in Lightroom, which does much of the work for you.

Lightroom automatically keeps track of your photos by the dates they were captured. In the My Photos panel on the left, click By Date to expand a menu in which you can choose to view photos by the year, month, and day they were captured.

Lightroom stores your original photos for you in the Cloud. If you want to keep a copy of all your photos locally in addition to in the Cloud, go to Adobe Lightroom > Preferences (MacOS) or Edit > Preferences (Windows) and click Local Storage. Click the checkbox Store a copy of all originals locally.

If you want to store those copies on a roomy external drive rather than on your computer, click Change Location, navigate to the external drive, and click Choose (MacOS) or Select Folder (Windows). These changes will take place when you restart Lightroom.

If you want to keep a local copy of specific photos, rather than all your photos, click the Square Grid icon in the toolbar, select one or more photos, click the checkmark under any of the selected photos, and click the Store original locally switch.

To delete a photo from your photo library, select the photo and choose Edit > Delete Photo. Remember that if you delete a photo, it will be removed from the Cloud and from all your synced devices. So it’s a good idea to make a copy of that photo outside of Lightroom before you delete it from Lightroom.

Albums are a simple way to quickly access related photos in Lightroom. You might use albums to group photos by subject, by favorites, by projects, or by workflow tasks such as photos to adjust.

Albums and changes you make to them sync through the Cloud to all your devices.

If the Albums panel isn’t showing, click My Photos (the file box icon). To create a new album, click the plus icon at the top right of the Albums panel and choose Create Album. Name the album and click Create. Alternatively, you can make an album from the preview screen while you’re adding photos to Lightroom, as we’ve been doing for the sample files for these Get Started tutorials.

To add photos to an album, select one or more photos in the Photo grid, the Square grid, or the Filmstrip and drag them onto the album in the Albums panel.

The same photo can be in multiple albums.

To remove photos from an album, select the album; then select one or more photos in that album. Choose Edit > Remove photos from Album and click Remove Photo . This does not delete the photos from other albums or from your photo library. If you click All Photos, the photos will still be there.

To delete an entire album, right-click (or Control+click) the album in the Albums panel, choose Delete Album, and click OK. This does not delete the photos from other albums or from your photo library.

You can organize your albums into folders to keep your list of albums manageable. To create a folder for albums, click the plus icon at the top right of the Albums panel and choose Create Folder. Name the folder and click Create. To add albums to a folder, select one or more albums in the Albums panel and drag them on top of the folder in the Albums panel. Click the triangle to the left of a folder to collapse and expand the folder.

With a photo selected, click the Info icon at the bottom of the column on the right to open the Info panel.

In the Info panel, you can add title, caption, and copyright information to the photo.

You can view information about the photo, including the file name, capture date, size and format of the photo, and camera settings with which the photo was captured.

If the camera was GPS enabled, you can see location information and view a map of the location where the photo was captured.

You also can view the sync status of the photo at the bottom of the Info panel.