Adobe Lightroom consists of five modules, each of which involves a different portion of the digital workflow. Library (importing, organizing, comparing and slecting) Develop (editing) and Slideshow, Print and Web which are for presentation and output.
The interface of the Library module consists of an image display area in the center, and panels on the left and right. The numbers in the text correspond to the numbers in red on the diagram. A toolbar shows viewing, sorting, flagging, rating and navigating tools. The filmstrip is a row of small thumbnails of the photos in the folder with which you are working.
Lightroom is catalog driven, so you must import images into catalogs (databases of information about the image) for Lightroom to access them. The catalogs do not contain the image files, which are located on your computer or external hard drive. Rather, the catalogs retain information that Lightroom uses to locate or process the images. When you import images to a catalog, the database houses information, including: a Jpeg preview, metadata including camera type, lens type and ISO, picture data, a link to locate the images on your computer or external drive, image organization, such as keywords and ranking within collections; and editing instructions applied in the Develop module.
Upon opening Lightroom and importing images, a default catalog will be created. Every time you import images, you can either import them to this catalog or choose to import them to a new catalog that you create. One catalog is the best way to begin. We will start with a test catalogue. At this point it is essential that you have your external drive because this will be what you will be using throughout the semester to point Lightroom towards for the catalogue and a stable place to import your images.
When you import into Lightroom you have the option to Copy, Move, Add or Copy as DNG (Digital Negative). In general, Copy is the one you would want to select. This allows you to leave the actual file in the folder it was imported into, and Lightroom works on the data associated with the images.
In the above panel you can see where it defaults to the device that is attached (in this case an iphone) but you still have control to tell it where to import from by clicking on the arrows in the upper left corner. The upper right corner is where you can see the options for what you would do while you are importing the files. You can re-name the files, add a copyright to the files, etc. through this dialogue box.