How to transfer photo edits to new PC

[brianmasson]

I reinstalled LR6 on my new computer and copied my lightroom photos to the new computer's hard drive. Lightroom reestablished the catalog with my photo heirarchy (I think I imported the photos) and everything works fine, except that the edits I did on the photos on my old computer didn't come across. I suspect that I need to extract something from the catalog on my old computer and plug it into the catalog on my new computer. Is this possible?

[Rob_Cullen]

If you wrote a document with a word processor on one computer, would you expect a new document on another computer to have the same words? No.

Likewise a Lightroom Catalog (that is a database file) will only be the same on the new computer if you copied it from the 'old' to the 'new' computer.

So - Importing photos on the new computer was the wrong thing to do- it is a new database. (like starting a new empty word document!)

You needed to copy your 'old' catalog to the 'new' computer along with the photos in the same folder structure.

For a detailed answer, read this article- Move Lightroom to a new computer? | The Lightroom Queen 

Hopefully you can still copy the Catalog from the old computer (or from a Backup- you do have catalog backups, right?).

[JP Hess]

If you used the catalogue from the old computer, and the images are in the same hierarchy that they were in on the old computer, then all that should have been necessary would have been to open Lightroom using that old catalog and go to work. If, as you indicated, you imported the images again on the new computer then that would seem to indicate that you have imported a new copy that would not have the adjustments. The adjustments are not stored in the image but rather are stored in the catalog. I probably haven't explained it very well. But you should have used the old catalog which contained all of the adjustments, and let it point to the images in the folders where they are located.