Best way to export catalogs so someone else can open/edit them?

[Tom_brown3]

I'm just finishing up a year-long job for a client, and I want to give her every single photo I've taken but make sure that she can open and edit them in the lightroom on her computer. Can I just export the catalogs to a properly formatted hard drive? 

[JohanElzenga]

Yes, but you need to verify that she uses the same version of Lightroom. Older versions cannot open a newer catalog, and your version cannot export in an older catalog format.

[Tom_brown3]

When I export catalogs in this manner, and then open the drive that I have exported them to each catalog has its own LRCAT file, unlike mine, which is just titled Z9 LR Kat V 13 see screenshot for example. How can I get them all into one file similar to my own?

[JohanElzenga]

Obviously you should export all photos as one single catalog... Select all photos you want to export, then choose to export the selected photos as catalog.

[richardplondon]

Yes, specifically you would want to make sure when carrying out Export as Catalog that the option "include originals" is chosen. This duplicates a corresponding subfolder arrangement into the target storage alongside the newly created Catalog, populated with duplicates of all the needed files (and only those). Therefore if there were other photos originally taken but then culled / not imported, these would be excluded by this process.

You can select all of the images desired, checking the option to include selected images only, if these are only a subset within your current Catalog. I believe (may be wrong) only those Collections in which these images feature - and only the keywords that they use - would then arrive. For Smart Collections I suspect you may get copies made of all those, so there may be some cleanup of unwanted stuff to do before sending off the disk. Also initially the new Catalog will not have Library previews made so if you want your client to have an immediately responsive experience navigating the photos it may be worth the trouble  of setting this Catalog to work yourself, in generating those 'up front'.

[Tom_brown3]

thank you

[Tom_brown3]

My main concern is that my client gets the originals, my edited photos, but doesn't have access to my presets, watermarks, etc.

[richardplondon]

If you export out a separate Catalog and all the associated image files, those will be all that the client gets.

The photos that you have edited show the RESULTS (and the History steps) from your having perhaps used presets, but the resulting image state is no different than if you had instead applied the exact same changes manually. The presets themselves are not conveyed. I suppose presets could be reverse-engineered and re-created working from the Catalog's History information - but this would be very laborious to do.

If you truly wanted to conceal the details of what your editing consisted of then you would supply only final exported files and camera originals without any Catalog or any accompanying XMP metadata. Personally I think what we are selling to a client is the judgement, artistry and strategy about how and when tools are used (or not used) for each newly encountered case - which is a different matter, than the specific processing that has been used in any particular case. Because you cannot extrapolate from the latter to the former.

[JohanElzenga]

My main concern is that my client gets the originals, my edited photos, but doesn't have access to my presets, watermarks, etc.

By @Tom_brown3

They don't get access to that. Presets and watermarks are not stored in the catalog, so they are not exported with a catalog either.