Combining multiple Lightroom catalogs

Question

I have somehow ended up with 14 catalogs in my Lightroom folder on my computer along with the related lrcat and helper.Lrdata folders (Total of 50 folders). I didn't make these extra catalogs intentionally, but I see they are named like Catalog 2-v10 and catalog v12-2 as examples, so I'm thinking they might be resulting from various version updates?

Anyway, I would like to combine them into one catalog, so I don't have my files scattered across multiple catalogs. Is there a command or a process that Lightroom can run to move all the photos to one catalog and eliminate duplicates at the same time? Will it be able to differentiate between a picture that is unedited in one catalog but edited in another and save only the edited one? Each catalog is between 8000 and 15000 images so I would prefer not to have to sort them manually.

This is in preparation to get a new computer eventually as I'm currently running Windows 10 on an older HP Spectre. Running Lightroom classic 13.0.1

GoldingD · Answer

" I didn't make these extra catalogs intentionally, but I see they are named like Catalog 2-v10 and catalog v12-2 as examples, so I'm thinking they might be resulting from various version updates?"

Sound like old catalogs via LrC upgrades. Their should be no reason to import from the old catalogs into the latest if that is the case. You may need to consider if they are in fact old and possibly no longer needed versions.

Be careful.

If you are nervous about deleting them, then perhaps consider moving them to a external hard drive for archive.

Not an Adobe employee, so take the above with caution.

"Running Lightroom classic 13.0.1 "

Understand that LrC before v14 used to create upgraded catalogs in the way you are describing. But at v14 that has changed, instead a copy is created and placed in a folder, and the new upgrade is created with the same name as the previous.

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