A

Anonymous

Question

Lightroom 3 ~ Move photos from one catalog to another, existing catalog? Not "export as new catalog"

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
January 22, 2013
4 replies
16779 views

After consulting the interwebs and the Adobe site and a book about Lightroom 3, I remain confused about how to quickly and easily get photos from one existing catalog to a different catalog, since LR doesn't allow one (for its own arcane reasons, I assume) to have more than one catalog open at once.

Say I've got a Quick Collection of stuff I previously imported into "Catalog X" when it really belongs in "Catalog Y." What is the best way to get those photos into Catalog Y? Exporting this Quick Collection as a new catalog; closing down Catalog X; bringing up Catalog Y; running an import dialogue to import that Quick Collection... well, that seems pretty ridiculous. I assume I'm missing something obvious. Anyone know what the command is?

Also, if anyone can direct me to the Lightroom 3 discussions, as the search function here seems pretty rudimentary (e.g. put "lightroom 3" in the search box and it will bring up dozens of hits for "lightroom 4.3"), that'd be awesome... thanks...

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A

Anonymous

thanks, everyone, for your quick replies. sounds like there is no "quickly and easily" for what i'm wanting to do. egads. i will probably end up reverting to (blugh) iPhoto at this rate!

it's fine with me if Adobe wants to call a database a catalog, cornelia-l... but it should have a pretty little button that says, "copy this database item, including its original image and metadata and stuff, over to this other database." oh well, i am but a lowly user and i am not the person Adobe makes these things for. :-P

as for why move it: at the beginning of this process i hired a photographer who uses LR to help me learn LR. his preferred method is to keep several catalogs, each with their images also saved, on separate hard drives. other people seem to prefer one giant catalog, others have their own ways of doing it. i have ended up, after realizing how difficult LR3 makes moving things around between catalogs, using just two big catalogs most of the time. i have about 4,000 photos in the family catalog, and another 5,000 in the Easter Island Project catalog for an art piece i'm doing.

i accidentally imported some images into Family instead of Easter Island, and today thought i would simply and easily and quickly get those photos into the right catalog.

i would rather not have a single database of around 10,000 images to deal with every time i want to edit, export, copy, or back up anything. i would like to go, "Oh yeah, let me bring Hard Drive #2 with all the Easter Island Project stuff on it with me on this trip," or use it on Dropbox for a while when i'm traveling.

also, for some reason my brain really objects to having the files I need for a single operation spread out all over the place. i would like to have the Family database and all the image files in one place/in one folder/on one hard drive. something i can easily drag the whole thing onto another drive to copy it.

if LR's later versions make this easier, i might bother with upgrading! or if there are some scripts to help get my photos out of LR and into some other application while retaining the current edits, keywords, etc.

i suppose i could redo everything i've already done in LR over the last year, so it's all one catalog, but at this rate the whole thing is pissing me off so much i'd rather go back to doing everything by hand, one at a time, in an ancient version of Photoshop! "saving time" only saves you so much time if you spend weeks farting around with software, attempting to learn it, having it not do what you want anyway, and then by the time you've mastered a few things, it's been upgraded, and the version you prefer probably doesn't work with the new OS that Apple has released, and dang, it's probably better to just make oil paintings of things you like. then you wouldn't have so many files. ha ha.

dj_paige

Legend

Wow, etcetera, you still have a bunch of misconceptions

it's fine with me if Adobe wants to call a database a catalog, cornelia-l... but it should have a pretty little button that says, "copy this database item, including its original image and metadata and stuff, over to this other database." oh well, i am but a lowly user and i am not the person Adobe makes these things for. :-P

No, the problem is that you are not a lowly user; the problem is that you are using LR in ways that it wasn't designed to be used. And the reason Adobe doesn't give you a "copy to another catalog" button is because Lightroom was designed for primarily a single catalog; yes you can indeed use multiple catalogs if you want to give up some features and work harder.

i would rather not have a single database of around 10,000 images to deal with every time i want to edit, export, copy, or back up anything.

I would guess that most LR users have a LOT more than 10,000 images in a catalog. I have a catalog of about 21,000 images, and I don't have a single issue with having a catalog that large. Nor do I have a single issue with trying to find, for example, my railroad photos in this large catalog that contains personal photos, architecture photos, landscape photos, travel photos and railroad photos. In this situation, you are given a HUGE number of tools (because that's what LR was designed to do) to find/organize/separate these photos when I want them.

So its really your choice ... use LR in a way (one catalog) that has a HUGE number of tools at your disposal, or use it in a way (multiple catalogs) that has much more limited tools.

also, for some reason my brain really objects to having the files I need for a single operation spread out all over the place

and yet Lightroom was designed to eliminate the problems that you might have when your files are spread out

i would like to have the Family database and all the image files in one place/in one folder/on one hard drive. something i can easily drag the whole thing onto another drive to copy it.

Lightroom does not prevent you or hinder you from doing this. And if you want to drag the whole thing to somewhere else, use Lightroom to do this!! Lightroom doesn't prevent this at all.

if LR's later versions make this easier, i might bother with upgrading!

All of this is amazingly easy in the version of LR that you have. Upgrading doesn't make these issues any easier

i suppose i could redo everything i've already done in LR over the last year, so it's all one catalog,

You don't have to redo anything to create a single master catalog. You just merge them. You already figured out the process of moving photos from one catalog to another. Do that for ALL photos and you now have one catalog.

I think you should give it a try. Everything you said you wanted can be done in a single catalog; it gets a little tougher with two catalogs.

C

Cornelia-I

Inspiring

You seem to be another "victim" of Adobe's marketing term *catalog*, when they should have named it *database*.

Many people think collections and catalogs should be synonyms, as they almost are in everyday's language.

But within LR they mean technically very different stuff.

If you tell us what you'd like to achieve when you think of moving images from one catalog into another, we can probably suggest you something in line with LR's intended set-up.

Because that is for most people to have 1 catalog, apart from interim catalogs while out shooting.

Cornelia

dj_paige

Legend

I remain confused about how to quickly and easily get photos from one existing catalog to a different catalog

I think you understood the process properly. The error you make, that causes you to be confused, is expecting a method that can be done "quickly and easily". Unrealistic expectations!

Which is why you should use a single catalog, and then the effort of moving photos from one catalog to another is ZERO EFFORT! Can't beat that!

john beardsworth

Community Expert

You will have to select the photos, do an Export as Catalog, remove the photos from the current catalogue. Then open the other catalogue, do an Import from Catalog. Then delete the exported catalogue.

That's as simple as it gets and you may judge it a lot of effort for little gain. It's better to use metadata to categorise your pictures, not fragment control of your work across multiple catalogues.

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