How to move lightroom catalogue to laptop, leave photo files on external drive?

Thanks so much everyone, I very much appreciate your input. I guess each user has a unique work flow and storage plan. I had been hearing that using Smart Previews allowed for improved speed and a very lean storage option when you want to leave the external drive behind. It seems that this might work best if one regularly prunes the standard previews, which may be a good option for me to try. I do use a 4GB spinning external drive and sometimes actions in Lightroom or Photoshop feel a bit like melting ice. But it is easy to keep complete backups as some have mentioned. I'll have to experiment!

Cheers

John

https://dowler.photo

https://instagram.com/johndowler1

Really, the simple and effective thing to do is move the photo's and catalog (and presets etc) to the external drive. In fact, if you can deadicate an external drive for just that data, you can make your life and backup schema so much easier. All that data will simply grow larger over the years of adding more images, presets, etc. No 'links' to worry about. 

Please clarify, are you moving from a desktop computer to your laptop or is your primary computer the Macbook Pro?

If the Macbook Pro is the only computer involved it will only be a benefit to moving the Catalog all the previews including the smart-previews and other Catalog files if there is ample room on the internal Hard disk.

For efficient functioning of the Macbook Pro you should have at least 20% free disk space available at all times.

The previews folder must be in the same folder with the catalog and it will grow with time. You can change the size the previews being used to help reduce the size of that folder. And, you can delete that folder and Lightroom will begin creating a new previews folder as you work with images. But it will grow again. And, again, when it becomes too large again you can delete it and start over. This could have some impact on performance, but shouldn't cause an insurmountable problem.

Your question is not clear. In your title you say want to move the catalog, but in your text you say you want to move "files". Please clarify exactly what you want to move.