From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Lightroom Classic CC travel tip: Combine catalogs

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Lightroom Classic CC travel tip: Combine catalogs

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- Hi my name is Chris Orwig, and welcome to Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode we are talking about Light Room Classic CC and Catalogs. And this one comes from a question which I received, which was, "Hey Chris, when you travel, or when you have other projects, do you bring your main catalog with you?" And the answer is no. And on a talk a little bit about why and also what I do when I travel, and how I combine multiple catalogs together. First let me set the stage. Here you can see in Lightroom I have a representation of my main catalog. This is the one that lives on my main computer. It has access to all of my thousands and thousands of images, and this one stays on that computer. Then, when I go on a trip I create a new catalog and I have that on my laptop. And once I finish the trip I'll have that catalog, as you can see here, in the folder of all of the images. And what I do is I combine these two catalogs together, the one from my trip to New York and then my main catalog. And the way that I do that is I open up the main catalog, go to the File pull down menu and choose "Import From Another Catalog", and then here I'm going to navigate to that location where I have this on my Desktop, select the .lrcat file, that's the light green catalog file, and then click "Choose". This will open up a dialog window and it will show you all of the images and say, "Hey what do you want to do with these?" And all that I want to do is add these new photos to catalogs without moving. If I'm going to move a folder or an image, I always do that later, inside of Lightroom. So first of all, just Default Settings, add these photos, let's do it, click Import. What this will then do is it will bring in all of those photographs, and what we will be able to see is that we now have these images here, and the various folders, so I could go to the specific folders and work on those images or take a look at them and do whatever I needed to do. Now, if these are in the wrong location, maybe they're in the wrong folder or maybe I want to put them on a different hard drive, what I would do is then select the files and drag them into a new location inside of this folder panel. So any movement that needs to be done, I'll do later. In this way it keeps me really nimble, so I have a fresh new catalog when I go and travel, and then I combine the two back together when I get home, and I do that by going to File, Import From Another Catalog. Now what do I do with a catalog after I've imported it? Well I delete it, get rid of it. Because I don't need it anymore, because it's all now part of my main catalog here. I hope that that little tip helps in regards to working with catalogs in Lightoom, and I hope you have a fantastic day. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye for now.

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