The short answer is that as you work in Lightroom – adding keywords, stars, flags and other metadata; developing your photos; creating collections and more, your work is being saved automatically, so there is no need to do a “Save” before you wrap up your session.
Another frequent inquiry is “How do I save my work in Lightroom?”.
You can choose to save your work only at the Lightroom Catalog level (not recommended). You can choose to save your work within your actual images when you manually trigger the Save Metadata to File Command while still keeping a copy of your work within your Lightroom Catalog (.lrcat) file.
Unlike most other programs, with Lightroom you have three choices determining when and where your work is saved. You can choose to save your work only at the Lightroom Catalog level (not recommended).
How do I make Lightroom automatically save my photos to XMP?
You can set Adobe Photoshop Lightroom so that all of your work is automatically, and continuously, saved for you into your image files and also stored within your Lightroom Catalog (.lrcat) file by turning on the Automatically Write Changes Into XMP Catalog Settings preference switch.
Another popular question is “How do I apply auto settings to multiple images in Lightroom?”.
There is already a preset in the default “Lightroom General Presets” set of presets called “Auto Settings” which will apply auto to your images. In order to use this on multiple images at once, you need to be in the Library module. There are multiple ways to apply auto settings in the Library module.
Does Lightroom slow down your computer when editing?
Keep in mind though that the history of your edits is not stored in the XMP file which is one of the benefits of the Lightroom catalog. So if you don’t already have that box checked in the Lightroom Catalog Settings, stop what you are doing and go turn it on now. Do some editing and see if you notice it slowing your computer down.
It might take an extra second to write to the xmp file (or so I’m told) but I’ve never noticed Lightroom to be any slower with the option turned on, and the XMP sidecar files it creates are tiny and take up virtually no space.