Moving Lightroom Classic from Windows to Mac

[jasonr75328440]

I purchased my first MacBook and am having troubles getting Lightroom Classic to display my catalog properly.  For better understanding all my photos are located on a NAS.  From my Windows 10 PC the mount point was "Z:/Multimedia/Picture Picture/..." and now from my Mac it is "/Multimedia/Picture Picture/...".  I got my catalog to connect however all of the photos under the collections section are just showing grey boxes with no images in them.  Any thoughts on what I need to do?

[GoldingD]

Where is your catalog?

Please do not answer , on the NAS

[jasonr75328440]

It is located in the user directory. Definitely not on the. AS.

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[jasonr75328440]

Response was supposed to say definitely not on the NAS.  

[Jao vdL]

You probably simply need to reconnect the top level folder to the right location. The Z: part in the location is meaningless on Macs so it simply doesn't know where to look for the images. Look in the folder section for your top level folder and right (or control) click on it and select "Update Folder Location". Now point it to the location of the NAS mount on your new machine - just navigate to it in the interface that pops up.

[Jao vdL]

I forgot to say that when the folder is not where Lightroom expects it to be, instead of update folder location, it will say Find Missing Folder.

[jasonr75328440]

You were correct that I needed to find the new location of each folder.  The issue was my Lightroom orginization stinks and there were hundreds of folders...probably need to rethink how I do that.

Anyway, thanks for the help.  Good to go now!

[CJAII]

Hi, I am also trying to migrate my Lightroom Classic catalog with approximately 60K pictures that reside on a NAS from a PC to a Mac. I also have the path on the PC with a drive letter. I know that Macs dont use drive letters. I was able to migrate my catalog from one PC to another with little effort but now I am stalled with the migration from the PC to the Mac. I moved the .lrcat file without problems and the catalog is loading as such but there is the Group of folders called "D:" under which are tons of folders with question marks on them. It seems I have to do "Find missing folder" for each of the folders that has a questionmark on it. Is there no way to do this faster, this will take me hours as I have more than 1k folders? The folders are almost all in two subfolders on the NAS and during a PC-to-PC migration, I was able to select one of the folders and it found all others in the subfolder. Not now. Any ideas what I can do?

[GoldingD]

Hi, I am also trying to migrate my Lightroom Classic catalog with approximately 60K pictures that reside on a NAS from a PC to a Mac. I also have the path on the PC with a drive letter. I know that Macs dont use drive letters. I was able to migrate my catalog from one PC to another with little effort but now I am stalled with the migration from the PC to the Mac. I moved the .lrcat file without problems and the catalog is loading as such but there is the Group of folders called "D:" under which are tons of folders with question marks on them. It seems I have to do "Find missing folder" for each of the folders that has a questionmark on it. Is there no way to do this faster, this will take me hours as I have more than 1k folders? The folders are almost all in two subfolders on the NAS and during a PC-to-PC migration, I was able to select one of the folders and it found all others in the subfolder. Not now. Any ideas what I can do?

By @CJAII

Do those folders have parent folders, and have you updated those folders?

[CJAII]

Hello GoldingD, thank you for replying. The folders on the NAS do have parent folders indeed, however I don't know how to get at them. I am using a German version of Lightroom, forgive me for translation errors. When I right-click on a folder with a question mark and select "show folder above", I get an error message stating something that looks a bit like SQL code: "

Database "/Users/username/Pictures/CJA Lightroom Catalog-2-v13.lrcat": UNIQUE constraint failed: AgLibraryFolder.rootFolder, AgLibraryFolder.pathFromRoot

sql: UPDATE AgLibraryFolder SET rootFolder = ?,pathFromRoot = ? WHERE id_local = ?; (error code 2067)"

[Jao vdL]

The problem is that the parent folder has a D: in the name which is illegal on Mac OS (the colon character). If you had moved all the subfolders in a parent folder already on the PC (e.g. D:\parent folder\individual folders), this would not have been an issue. It is now refusing to give you a prent folder because there is none and the only data it has on it is an illegal character path in Mac OS. You might be stuck having to do update location on all the D:\ folders now. 

[CJAII]

Hi, my folder structure on the PC was as follows

D:/fotolibrary/2000-2010/2010_01_01 Dad's birthday/

D:/fotolibrary/2000-2010/2010_02_01 Mom's birthday

D:/fotolibrary/2010-2020/2015_01_01 Dad's birthday/

D:/fotolibrary/2010-2020/2015_02_01 Mom's birthday/

Which I think follows the structure you describe above. What I found is that if I look for the parent folder on the Windows machine, I get the same error. 

Chris

[Jao vdL]

Something else is a problem then if it already errors on windows. My guess is that the problem is the apostrophes in the folder names. Apostrophes are also special characters. I would try repairing the catalog first on windows and then renaming the folders