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George36909458l1xi
Participant
April 22, 2024
Question

Importing individual catalogs into a master catalog

  • April 22, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 226 views
I watched Julianne's tutorial on merging individual catalogs into a master. I am trying to do this and I have a particular problem with duplicates. When I got LR1, I tried to build a master catalog but it crashed every time I tried to import so I gave up and went to individual catalogs. A few years back with LR6 I decided to try the master catalog again and it worked. I have worked with the master catalog since. I have adopted keywording extensively in the master.
 
Now I'm trying to merge the past individual catalogs (all 370 of them) into the master. So I have virtually 100% duplicates. My problem is that the individual catalogs have extensive editing and rating, whereas the master has keywording for the duplicate files. I have tried all the options, but when I import an individual into the master, it wipes out my keywording in the master.
 
Does anyone know of a method or workaround to solve this problem?
This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
April 22, 2024

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/import-photos-various-sources.html

 

Scroll down to bullet 5. YOu have several options when importing a catalog, if the photo is in both catalogs

 

G
George36909458l1xiAuthor
Participant
April 22, 2024

Thank you! This does work. I had tried to work with this method in the following way. After import I switched the original and the copy, then I synced the (new) copy to the (new) original. So now I had an original with both the metadata and the keywords in it. Then I deleted the vitual. This was exactly what I wanted -  for a single photo, but I have about 375,000 photos. I tried to find a way to batch this process but had no luck. Do you know of a way to batch this last step? Thanks very much!

 

 

dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
April 22, 2024

I think someone could write a script to do this automatically. I think it would even be worth paying someone 100 currency units to have them do it for you. We have some people in this forum who have written scripts. I mention two names (and there are probably others), not knowing if they are interested in this kind of work:

@johnrellis 

@john beardsworth 

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