Eduardo Angel Visuals

Upgrading to Adobe Lightroom 4 in 7 simple steps.

The fol­low­ing steps can be used to upgrade Light­room 1, Light­room 2 or Light­room 3, as well as Light­room 4 Beta catalogs.

Step 1. Down­load and Install Light­room 4

Step 2. On your Mac’s finder, find the loca­tion of your Light­room 3 catalog. It should look some­thing like name.lrcat

Step 3. Right click on that file and select “open with Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room 4″

Step 4. You should see the “Light­room Cat­a­log Upgrade” dia­log. Be very care­ful with this step. Cat­a­log names can NOT be changed later. I strongly sug­gest you click on “change” and deter­mine the best loca­tion and name for your upgraded catalog.

—Click to con­tinue
As you can see I cre­ated a new FOLDER (EAP_LR4_Laptop) and a new CATALOG name EAP_LR4_Laptop.

You might be won­der­ing why I picked this nam­ing struc­ture. Sim­ple:
EAP stands for Eduardo Angel Pho­tog­ra­phy
LR4 is obvi­ously Light­room 4
And Lap­top is the loca­tion of the Cat­a­log, the place where all my Light­room set­tings (key­words, pre­sets, pre­views, plug-ins, etc) will be stored. This is espe­cially impor­tant if you often shoot on loca­tion and need to sync tem­po­rary cat­a­logs to your per­ma­nent cat­a­log. See our pre­vi­ous post with step-by-step instruc­tions on how to do this.

Step 5. Ready? Jump! Hit “Cre­ate” and then “Upgrade”

Keep in mind that Light­room will cre­ate a NEW cat­a­log inside the new folder we just cre­ated. The old pre­views will me moved to the new loca­tion but the old Light­room 3 Cat­a­log will still exist in your sys­tem. I rec­om­mend keep­ing this file for a cou­ple of weeks until you have con­firmed that all the images and set­tings were upgraded correctly.

ime for a quick cof­fee break. Depend­ing on your sys­tem specs, how many images you have, the file sizes, pre­sets etc, the upgrade can take sev­eral min­utes. I have over 50,000 RAW files and 600 pre­sets, and the upgrade took less than 4 min­utes.

Step 6. We are almost there. You now see the “Enable reverse geocod­ing” dia­log, which is basi­cally ask­ing for per­mi­sion to access Google Maps. Even though I am NOT happy with Google’s recent pri­vacy pol­icy changes, I rec­om­mend enabling this fea­ture so you can use the brand new Map Mod­ule.

If later on you regret feed­ing Big Brother more infor­ma­tion, you can dis­able this fea­ture under the “Meta­data” tab of the “Cat­a­log Set­tings” Dialog.

Step 7. Done! We have suc­cess­fully upgraded our Light­room 3 cat­a­log into a brand new Light­room 4 catalog.

One last thing to con­sider: Any new changes done in Light­room 4 will not be avail­able in pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Light­room. What this means is, if you are in the mid­dle of a project, fin­ish it in Light­room 3 and then do the upgrade. Now is time to play.