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wenda pyman
wenda pyman
Known Participant
April 23, 2019
Question

Importing from another catalog not working

  • April 23, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 5761 views

I'm going to pull my hair out. In the past, I would export unedited folders from my main LR catalog to my Macbook and edit them while I am away. When I return home, I 'export as a catalog' my edited images to a flash drive. I then 'import from another catalog' to my iMac LR catalog. I've always done this in the past and never had any problems. My imported edited images would show up and the old settings would show up as virtual copies.

Lately, I followed this same workflow but no matter what I do, it doesn't work. I get as far as the 'Import from Catalog' dialog box showing the catalog contents but it won't let me check off the folder that I want to import. Also, it won't let me change the existing metadata and develop settings (grayed out) I have spent countless hours trying to do this every which way but nothing works. What has changed, or what am I doing wrong?  HELP!!

As an aside, I also in the past tried to follow Julienne Kost's method of plugging in my external hard drive into my Macbook and working on the images using Smart previews. That has never worked, which is why I just export and import the catalog folders. Anyway, I hope someone out there can enlighten me.

Thanks.

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    1 reply

    Sahil.Chawla
    Community Manager
    Sahil.ChawlaCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    April 23, 2019

    Hi Wenda,

    That shouldn't be happening, as import from another catalog is not working as expected, could you please let us know the exact version of Lightroom you're working on?

    Also, please have a look at Chris's reply on this forum thread and let us know if it helps:

    Importing from another catalog

    Regards,
    Sahil

    wenda pyman
    wenda pymanAuthor
    Known Participant
    April 24, 2019

    I still have not resolved this even after reading all the threads from Chris' post. I've tried re-exporting the catalog onto a clean flash and then 'importing from another catalog' into my main LR catalog, using "don't import new photos" and make original virtual copies. In one experiment I was able to get it to import and it showed up in "Previous Import" as virtual copies, but not in the desired folder. I've never had so much trouble in the past. I've wasted several days trying to get these edited catalog into my main working catalog. No luck.

    One question: should I be naming the edited catalog the same as the target catalog folder? I've tried moving those virtual images into the desired catalog folder but it says I cannot move virtual copies.

    JohanElzenga
    JohanElzenga
    Community Expert
    April 27, 2019

    Hi, Johan,

    I hope you are around. I've tried doing this every which way, but no luck. They may not be in the right order but I labeled them. I even tried starting all over, but in the end, when importing them into my Main LR Catalog it tells me there are new photos, no changed photos and the virtual copies option is grayed out. Anyway, maybe you can see what I am not doing right. But as I said, I've done this before and even wrote up what I do to transfer the edited images and it has always been fine. Here are the posts. It also tells me I have 54 missing previews. I don't understand that either since before I 'Exported as a catalog', I rebuilt both the standard previews and the smart previews. Anyway, I've had to put the screenshots in photoshop since I can't seem to insert as a pdf. Mine aren't png's.

    I also didn't use 'Collections'. Just straight Folders with my images. Thanks for your time. W


    You can also post too many screenshots. I don’t know which is which, because I see some screenshots that look the same, except for some numbers that Lightroom reports. Perhaps you should post screenshots of one single sequence of events, so we get an idea what exactly happens.

    One thing that I do notice is that Lightroom tells you in the import dialog that most of the original images are missing in the main catalog. It tells you it can copy these images from the catalog you are importing. Are the images really missing? You only show the folder panel and not the grid, so I can’t tell...

    -- Johan W. Elzenga
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