Noobiest of Nooby Questions [Questions on Lightroom catalog and exporting]

[Ignatious_Riley]

I recently switched over to Lightroom (stand alone program) from Apple Photos, and I'm really confused about the Lightroom catalog and exporting.  I have an external hard drive that I keep my LR catalog on, but I started off sloppily exporting my photos for various projects back to my Mac's hard drive.  For instance, I set up an export to Facebook folder and export to Instagram folder, etc.  After a few months into LR, I'm realizing this probably isn't the best way to organize exports...if I need to organize exports at all.  My questions are:

1. How should I think about the the LR catalog for imports and creating folders for exports?

2. Do I need to save my exports once I've posted them somewhere since I have the LR catalog?

3. Isn't creating and keeping an export file system redundant since I have a catalog?

[F. McLion]

Best practice:

To work with images in LR you need to import these - please note that the images are NOT in LR. They stay where they are before importing or are moved during the import. Do NOT delete them, move them from outside LR or alike, and make Backups, LR does NOT Backup your images.

There is actually no need to save exports. As long as you have the catalog (your edits) and the original images in place you can always re-export anything. Exporting is a temporary thing for when you need some images somewhere.

[Ignatious_Riley]

Thanks, F. McLion.  I know not to move things around in Finder (the hard way).  I guess what I'm asking is what's an example of the workflow I can use.  Right now I'm doing the following:

1. Importing from SD card to LR catalog on external drive

2. Culling and labeling

3. Editing

4. Exporting edits per project to various folders

5. Wondering what to do next with those exports now that they've been sent.

[F. McLion]

I can only speak for myself (and possibly various others).

5. would be: Remove the ones not currently needed since they can always be re-exported in their latest version.