Upgrading to Adobe Lightroom 4 in 7 simple steps.

[macuser88]

The fol­low­ing steps can be used to upgrade Light­room 1, Light­room 2 or Light­room 3, as well as Light­room 4 Beta catalogs.

Step 1. Down­load and Install Light­room 4

Step 2. On your Mac’s finder, find the loca­tion of your Light­room 3 catalog. It should look some­thing like name.lrcat

Step 3. Right click on that file and select “open with Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room 4″

Step 4. You should see the “Light­room Cat­a­log Upgrade” dia­log. Be very care­ful with this step. Cat­a­log names can NOT be changed later. I strongly sug­gest you click on “change” and deter­mine the best loca­tion and name for your upgraded catalog.

—Click to con­tinue
As you can see I cre­ated a new FOLDER (EAP_LR4_Laptop) and a new CATALOG name EAP_LR4_Laptop.

You might be won­der­ing why I picked this nam­ing struc­ture. Sim­ple:
EAP stands for Eduardo Angel Pho­tog­ra­phy
LR4 is obvi­ously Light­room 4
And Lap­top is the loca­tion of the Cat­a­log, the place where all my Light­room set­tings (key­words, pre­sets, pre­views, plug-ins, etc) will be stored. This is espe­cially impor­tant if you often shoot on loca­tion and need to sync tem­po­rary cat­a­logs to your per­ma­nent cat­a­log. See our pre­vi­ous post with step-by-step instruc­tions on how to do this.

Step 5. Ready? Jump! Hit “Cre­ate” and then “Upgrade”

Keep in mind that Light­room will cre­ate a NEW cat­a­log inside the new folder we just cre­ated. The old pre­views will me moved to the new loca­tion but the old Light­room 3 Cat­a­log will still exist in your sys­tem. I rec­om­mend keep­ing this file for a cou­ple of weeks until you have con­firmed that all the images and set­tings were upgraded correctly.

Time for a quick cof­fee break. Depend­ing on your sys­tem specs, how many images you have, the file sizes, pre­sets etc, the upgrade can take sev­eral min­utes. I have over 50,000 RAW files and 600 pre­sets, and the upgrade took less than 4 min­utes.

Step 6. We are almost there. You now see the “Enable reverse geocod­ing” dia­log, which is basi­cally ask­ing for per­mi­sion to access Google Maps. Even though I am NOT happy with Google’s recent pri­vacy pol­icy changes, I rec­om­mend enabling this fea­ture so you can use the brand new Map Mod­ule.

If later on you regret feed­ing Big Brother more infor­ma­tion, you can dis­able this fea­ture under the “Meta­data” tab of the “Cat­a­log Set­tings” Dialog.

Step 7. Done! We have suc­cess­fully upgraded our Light­room 3 cat­a­log into a brand new Light­room 4 catalog.

One last thing to con­sider: Any new changes done in Light­room 4 will not be avail­able in pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Light­room. What this means is, if you are in the mid­dle of a project, fin­ish it in Light­room 3 and then do the upgrade. Now is time to play.

[Jim Wilde]

Very nice and I'm sure will be very helpful for those who are unsure of the process. However, you are incorrect in your Step 4. The catalog name can be changed whenever you want, as often as you want, and the location can be changed as often as needed (apart from putting on a network drive). The only thing to remember if renaming the catalog is to also rename the previews cache as well (if you don't a new correctly named cache will be rebuilt automatically).

Re Step 3...if you are going to make this Mac-only, it's been my experience that many Mac users don't know how to 'right-click'.....it might be worthwhile including the Ctrl-click key combination.

[Cornelia-I]

It might be fair to warn all users for the time being that most likely they will be bitten by 2 bugs:

1. If you used tone curve adjustments in LR3-develop:
   They will be lost, as LR4 currently does not read this record from LR3-catalog, but replace it with a default, same as if in a new import.
   
   
2. If you have a folder structure with more than ca. 3000 images within one folder, you will not get them displayed.

So good advice: start LR4 with new imports only, and wait for LR3-catalog conversion until these bugs will have been fixed.

Unless none of the two prerequisites for problems apply to you.

Cornelia

[Geoff the kiwi]

There are lots of good tutorials also available on this that apply to both Mac and PC.

Also Catalog names can be changed anytime quite easily.

[hPersei]

Links please.

[cje20]

Does anyone know if these two bugs still exist with LR4RC2?

Thanks, Cliff

[Sean McCormack]

The first one was fixed for RC1. I don't see mention of the 2nd. I do have a folder with 4000 images that are displaying.

[Jim Wilde]

Both were fixed in RC1: