Using Same Catalog on Two Machines, But Presets Are Missing on One

[tstockard]

I store my presets with my catalog, and that catalog is on an external drive that I switch up between my desktop and laptop when I'm traveling.

All the presets show when using my desktop, but when I use my laptop and pull up the same catalog, a good amount of the presets are missing. If I import them again while using the laptop, then when I plug the harddrive back into my desktop, they appear twice.

How can I get them to be consistent between machines? I thought that was the whole point of storing them with the catalog, but maybe I'm missing a step somewhere?

[C.Cella]

@tstockard 

Which presets?

Develop Presets, Metadata Presets, Filter Presets, etc...?

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[CMass]

Hey @tstockard, 

Ideally, you wouldn't want to have a catalog on an external hard drive, I'm assuming you're asking about Develop Presets. If so, are those located on your main computer and not your laptop?  

^CM

[tstockard]

Why not? I travel a lot and work on a desktop at home and I need to have access to the same catalog wherever it is that I am working. The presets are located in the catalog, which is on the external drive that I access from both machines. I used to store the presets on both machines, but making sure both machines had the same set up every time I changed something was becoming pretty tedious, so I switched to storing the presets with the catalog. 

And yes, develop presets, sorry about that, I didn't think to specify.

[C.Cella]

Importing presets is not advised and it is likely what caused the Preset to be duplicated.

Upon importing Develop preset they are saved into ACR folders not near the catalog.

The option Store Presets with Catalog moves them to the Lightroom Settings > Settings folder.

Duplicates are most likely the result of "Importing presets" and not having option "Store Presets with with Catalog", which is NOT active be default.
I ahd that and it lead to hundreds of duplicates.

Do not import Develop Presets ever, copy the "Settings" folder and paste it manually in the appropriate location.

Now that you have duplicates you will have to delte then manually, delete them from the Explorer or Finder as doing manually from LrC is painfully slow.

I suggest using "Fix Presets" plug-in by @johnrellis to properly organise presets into Folders or vice versa crete groups from folders.

We asked for years and years to choose a destination for Presets OR even better to sync them to the cloud to be accessible transferable to all machines but was never considered.

As @CMass says is not advised to store Catlog on an external drive.

While tedious is better to copy the entire folder that contains your catalog from a machine to another.

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[tstockard]

I don't have duplicates. That happened in the past and I deleted them. All the presets ARE in the Settings folder, but only about half of them show up in the presets panel in LR when using my laptop. When I use my desktop, they are all there.
So if you're not supposed to store the presets with the catalog, why is it an option in the settings? This makes no sense at all.