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Hi
I back up my working catalog and images onto an external drive by using "import from another catalog" function. When I do this it picks the new photos to add and to update the metadata and development settings on images that have been modified. I normally do this every one or two months and did this yesterday and it needed to update this metadata for all of the images in the catalog. Normally I wouldn't do this again for another 8 weeks or so but I today added a new image to the work catalog and needed to backup using this method. Lightroom selected the new photo to import and, to my surprise, wanted to modify the metadata of all the other images (16+K) which takes quite a lot of time. Can you explain this because I don't think I worked on more than 3 or 4 images today so, by my reasoning, only those needed to be modified?
Thanks
PS. This time I selected "nothing" for metadata updates to save time, not sure if that was the right thing to do though.
Using:
iMac with Mojave OS
LR 9.2
Work catalog is on external CIE drive
Backup catalog is on different external CIE drive
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Import vs Export. Without knowing the exact step-by-step details of what you are doing, seems like "export as catalog" might be what you are doing?
Normally if you select nothing, the result is the same as select-all.
Without knowing the details of what you are doing, a simpler backup method is to simply copy the master LrCat file to the backup drive, ditto the image files. Plus, LR wants to create a ZIPped backup of the catalog when it exits based on the schedule you choose (weekly by default).
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Thanks Joe
Actually its not an export but an import
Here's a screen shot.
What I don't understand is why all the images in the source catalog are flagged with changes vs the ones in the destination catalog if I have not made any changes. I only backed up last week and since then I have only added 49 more images. Does LR make some sort of modification everytime it opens a catalog? My issue is that when I make a back up of the source catalog and images in this way it takes hours and I currently only have 16K images so it only going to get worse. I could select "Nothing" in the dropdown list for "Replace"
Do you have another thoughts
Thanks
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Importing an updated catalog into to an older version of the same catalog sounds risky to me. Anytime LR has a major update (7.0, 8.0, 9.0) the catalog has to be "upgraded" to make it compatible with any new features added in the update. I suspect that's what you are encoutering. As suggested instead use the LR Catalog Backup tool and your OS backup tools or file synchronization software to keep your image file backup up to date.
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Thanks Todd. I'll look in to how to do as you have suggested as the Time Machine doesn't work when the images are ion an external drive.
Regarding the major upgrades, to date I have not had any trouble, when I open up a catalog after an up grade there is a message that the catalog needs to be upgraded and I just click on accept and things have been fine so far.
Thanks again and sorry for taking so long to reply.