Are You Using Lightroom's Most Important Setting?

Much of the Lightroom content I share focuses on the app's front end, including the tools you'd use to manage, edit, and share your photos. And there is a lot to share regarding those tools, right? But there's also an entire set of app settings and preferences designed to customize and enhance your Lightroom experience.

Lightroom's Preferences window has numerous tabs and settings (but, thankfully, not nearly as many as Lightroom Classic), and while each is important to understand, one in particular has an outsized impact on how it manages your photos.

One of the most important considerations photographers make involves the local storage of their photos. And with Lightroom, we know that it primarily stores your photos in the cloud, which also serves as a secure and redundant backup solution. As of last October, Lightroom also lets you manage your photo library locally without having to sync it to the cloud.

But what about photographers who are syncing their library to the cloud? Is there a way for Lightroom to maintain a local copy of those photos as a backup? The answer is: sort of. And that's where this one particular Lightroom preference comes into play because while Lightroom can store a local copy of your entire cloud library, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is a bonafide backup solution. Check out my video to see why.

When you're done, I highly recommend checking out Lightroom Everywhere, my comprehensive course that'll teach you everything you need to know about managing, editing, and sharing your photos using Lightroom Desktop and Mobile.