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berniehn
Participant
June 4, 2026
Question

Questions and problems merging LrC catalog on laptop to master catalog on desktop

  • June 4, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 32 views

I use a LrC Classic on a laptop for several months of the year to manage bird photographs away from home. A three-day bird watching trip typically results in 3500 NEF (Nikon Raw) images, and over several months I typically start with a total of 20,000 files. I use the laptop to do culling and editing of the photos, deleting unused files. In the process of editing, I also produce DNG and possibly TIFF files stacked with the original NEF file. Eventually, I want to merge the files into the “master” LrC Classic catalog that I maintain on the home desktop. On both laptop and PC I am running the same version of LrC Classic 15.3.1. I have encountered problems merging the laptop catalog into the master, using guidance that I found on the website. I am hoping that one of you experts can help me explain the problems I encountered and confirm/correct how I tried to resolve it.

I know this is detailed, but I wanted to describe my setup so that you can help me. I hope you have the patience to read through, and provide your expert advice (questions/problems are highlighted in bold).

The file organization on the desktop and laptop are identical beyond the initial root path. On the desktop I have one or more subfolders of the form e.g. E:\Photos\Birds\Mylocation\SubfolderX (there are one or more of these). On the laptop I have the exact same subfolders in the form C:\Users\myname\Photos\Birds\Mylocation\SubfolderX.

I proceed as follows:

  1. Copy all the files from the laptop to the desktop retaining the file organization described above.
  2. Copy the bird.lrcat file from laptop to a staging location on the PC.
  3. Open LrC on the desktop. and choose File -> Import from Another Catalog… and choose the bird.lrcat that I copied in step 2. At this point, LrC showed me the folders it wanted to import, which were the ones that I had copied in step 1 above. It identified the number of new files that I had moved, and for File Handling, LrC showed it would choose the default “Add new photos without moving” which I left unchanged.
  4. Choose “Import” to add the photos to the catalog. The operation took a while and when it was finished, the Folder panel showed no difference. I had expected LrC to show missing folders with a question mark, but there was nothing there. In the Catalog panel, LrC showed that the Previous Import contained all the files that I had copied in step 1. In the Grid view, each photo had a ! in the upper right which said that Files are missing. I expected that, and right clicked the first file which asked me to Locate by Folder or File. Since the folders didn’t exist in the Folder Panel, I chose to Locate by File.
  5. Choose “Locate by File” and navigate to the folder on the desktop containing the file, and left clicked the “Find nearby files”. LrC located all the files in E:\Photos\Birds\Mylocation\Subfolder1 but it stopped there and didn’t continue to locate the other files that were in other subfolders, e.g. E:\Photos\Birds\Mylocation\Subfolder2, E:\Photos\Birds\Mylocation\Subfolder3, etc. The located files had all the same settings as on the laptop: label, keywords, ratings, stacking. Files that had been developed in the laptop had all their editing history. However, each located file had a ! in the upper right that said “Error writing metadata”.
  6. Select the ! of the first file that failed to locate in step 5, and choose “Locate by File”, and repeat step 5 using Subfolder2. The result was the exactly the same as in step 5: all the files in that folder were located, but none of the files in other subfolders. Also, all the files are flagged with “Error writing metadata”.
  7. Repeat step 5 to Locate by File for each subfolder

At this point, the master LrC catalog had all the files that were copied from the laptop located with all their settings correct. It was a tedious job going subfolder by subfolder and I thought that LrC Locate by File would have navigated the structure up and down, but it didn’t. Question: why did LrC require me to Locate one subfolder at a time instead of navigation the entire folder structure locating missing files?

 

All the files now had an alert (exclamation point in upper right of each image in Grid view) about “Error writing metadata”. I checked that he LrC Edit -> Catalog Settings -> Metadata shows that “Automatically write changes into sidecar files (XMP/ACR} is unchecked, and that Write date or time changes into proprietary raw files in unchecked.

 

When I clicked on the ! LrC said that “There was an unknown error while writing metadata to this photo. Retry?”. It offered three choices: “Import Settings from Disk”, “Retry Metadata Export”, and “Cancel”. Question: why did LrC think it had to write metadata into NEF files, and how can I prevent this from happening in the first place? I tried “Import Settings from Disk” on a single file and it cleared the alert without any apparent side effect. However, I was not sure why I had to do this. I right-clicked another image with the same alert, and tried “Metadata -> Read Metadata from File”. This also cleared the alert flag without any side effect. Ultimately, I selected all the files in each subfolder in turn, and chose “Metadata -> Read Metadata from File” to clear the alerts for all the files.

 

Right now, I seem to have merged all the files into the desktop and all their original laptop LrC settings intact. However, I had to Locate once for every subfolder which is tedious. I also had to run the “Read Metadata from File” and don’t understand why LrC failed and required me to do that.

 

Thanks for reading this far, I hope you can help answer the questions and suggest a workflow that will avoid the problems that I encountered.

    2 replies

    B
    berniehnAuthor
    Participant
    June 5, 2026

    Thank you once again. I tried what is the basics of the approach you used, and it worked perfectly without problem. For the record, here is the workflow that I used in detail:

    1. Copy all the files from the laptop to the desktop retaining the file organization described above. (i.e. Step 1 of the earlier workflow)
    2. Copy the bird.lrcat and the bird.lrcat-data files from the laptop to a staging location on the PC. (if you don't copy lrcat-data, LrC warns that without the .lrcat-data, the catalog would open but any existing AI edits would become invalid).
    3. Open the bird.lrcat copied from the laptop into the desktop staging location. (In the folder panel, LrC shows with “?” that the entire hierarchy of folders starting beyond the different root as missing)
    4. Right click the topmost missing folder in the hierarchy, select “Find Missing Folder…” and locate the folder on the desktop folder structure. (it takes a while, but LrC finds all the files. Now the original catalog on the laptop is up to date with all the files on the desktop and no reported errors)
    5. Close the updated copy of the bird.lrcat
    6. Open the bird.lrcat “master” catalog on the desktop (not the copy of the catalog that has been updated in step 4).
    7. Choose “File -> Import from Another Catalog…” and select the bird.lrcat catalog copied from the laptop and updated in step 4. (LrC starts the import process, and shows a dialog box identifying the new subfolders that were created in the laptop but were not in the master catalog).
    8. The import dialog box has options: New photos File Handling: “Add new photos to catalog without moving” – leave that default alone; (in my case) Changed Existing photos Replace: “Nothing” – the laptop may or may not have changed the files that are in the catalog in the master. I felt it wise not to do any updates to what was already on the master, so choose “Nothing”. Select OK. (the import may take some time)

    At this point, the merge of the laptop catalog updated in step 4 imported successfully into the master desktop catalog in step 8. None of the problems that I encountered in the first workflow occurred.

    When I think about what I did differently, it is basically these things:

    1. Copy both the .lrcat and the .lrcat-data files from the laptop to the desktop
    2. Update the location of the missing folders in the copied catalog from the laptop, and only then…
    3. Import the updated .lrcat copied from the laptop into the master .lrcat on the desktop.

    I speculate that the problem in my first workflow was that I was asking LrC to do way too much: both import the copy of the laptop catalog and to find the location on the desktop of the missing folder. Without the laptop copy of the .lrcat-data, LrC was getting by with the .lrcat-data of the master. All of that was problem confusing LrC and it resulted in the strange behavior. But the revised workflow looks stable.

     

    Thanks.

     

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 4, 2026

    Hi, ​@berniehn, thanks for the long explanation of what you are doing, and I’m sorry to say, you’ve done things as one would expect it to work if you were using Bridge, but you are using LRC. Please remember that LRC is ACR with a database. All of the edits are contained within the catalog as well as the location of each image, each folder, and each subfolder in the the catalog.

    I think the best way to explain how to do this (and there are other ways which I do not like or chose not to use), is how I do this.

    Getting photos from a laptop into your primary location

    If you need to get your photos from some travel photography into LRC, consider how I do it; it does work.

    Whenever my wife and I travel, I take photos. I use her laptop as I do not own one.

    First, every night, after I make all of the adjustments I wish to do on that day’s adventure, I quit LRC and back up the entire folder to an external drive. This includes the catalog(s) (which I save within the folder containing all of the images). I keep this master folder on the Desktop. Once I’ve backed up everything, I can now reformat the images on the card(s) (now that there are the original images and copies on the external hard drive. At this point, I put the external hard drive in a suitcase and NOT in the camera bag. (I keep the backup drive separate from the laptop.)

    I continue this process until the end of the trip, and I’m home.

    To get the images from the external drive to my primary catalog is a two-step process:

    1) Plug the external drive into your primary computer. Open LRC on your computer, locate the catalog of your trip on the external drive. After opening this, you will see that LRC does not know where any of the images are located because it has never known the images to be located on the external drive (that catalog only knows the location of the folders and files on the laptop). To fix this, I click on one of the “!” on any image and locate it on the external drive. Because the folder tree on the external drive is now “familiar” to LRC, as it is the same as what was on the laptop, it can now locate ALL of the images.

    2) Now, close that catalog and open the catalog on your primary LRC set of images. Next, go to import images from another catalog

    And, now import the travel catalog into your master catalog. Sit back and have a cup of coffee.

    One extra important big step: now, do a backup of your catalog and then, back up all of your images and catalogs on that drive’s backup (you do do that, don't you?

    I hope this makes sense, and I mostly hope that you have not removed the images from your laptop or all will be gone. If you have any questions, or need some elaboration on what I’ve written, just ask.

    Good luck!

    B
    berniehnAuthor
    Participant
    June 4, 2026

    Thanks for your reply. I understand that, unlike Bridge, the LrC catalog is where all the edits, labels, ratings, stacking, etc. are located. I see that you first correct your laptop copy of the catalog on your desktop to fix up the missing locations. Do you also have a hierarchical structure of folders like i did? Does the locate thread through the entire structure?

    Then you import that corrected catalog into your master catalog. That is different than what I was doing. I was importing the catalog into the master knowing full well that it wouldn’t find the file locations. Your approach fixes that first, and then imports into the master catalog.  I’ll try that out and see if it works better.

    And yes, I backup files and catalogs all the time.

    Thanks again.

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 4, 2026

    Yes, I always have folders and subfolders. Because the overall structure of the files are the same , it also needs the starting point to be the same. To focus the starting point in the external drive, it knows where to go from there. 
     

    Good luck!

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