So as my quarantine project - I upgraded my storage. From 12Tb to 36Tb.
As part of this I re-imported all my images into a new catalog in LR Classic.
All seems to be fine (except the usual sucky LR performance) except that all my collections including the collections I use to sync with LR CC are gone.
I am pretty sure that if I opened the old catalog I could resurrect them, but how to move them into my new catalog and re-establish the links with the images - which are now in a new physical location?
Re-importing is almost always the wrong thing to do.
You need to find your old catalog file and use that. If the folders are now disconnected because they pointed to the old storage, you point them to the new storage by following these instructions (particularly Figure 4 and associated text): http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm
I restored the old catalog - I nearly always back up cataolg on exit so I pretty much have daily catalog backups. but I have 4,000 folders it is asking me to manually select from in order to reassign a location, and there are enough of them on that hard drive that do not belong that that is totally impractical.... I did read that if you reassign the location on one folder it will automatically find all the others but that has not proven to be the case for me.
If you take the time to find a master folder then all of its subfolders should be automatically found. You really shouldn't have imported everything into a new catalog. Doing that resulted in not only losing your collections but probably lost all of your adjustments. Consequently, you're going to have to do all of your editing over again. The catalog is the key element in the Lightroom workflow. The images are not in the catalog, but all of the work you have done IS. Creating a new catalog usually isn't a good choice with that many folders of images already imported.
You dont lose the edits at all they are in the xmp either side car or embedded. I did not lose those edits. Frankly at the moment Lightroom performance is so bad I am just using it like I used to use Bridge - to pick my selects and then open selccts in photoshop and edit in photoshop. The spot healing tool in particular is so much faster in Photoshop, and once I have a set of adjustments I can export to a file and I have a macro to load my curves and white balance etc...
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