The process of moving your catalog cross-platform is exactly the same as moving to a new machine of the same platform. You might find that there are question marks all over the folders or there are icons in the corners of the thumbnails—question marks in LR4, or rectangles with or without exclamation marks in LR5 and later.
Those warnings appear if the original photos can no longer be found at the previous known location. If the photos were stored on an external drive, but the Windows drive letter has changed, you can simply reset the drive letter. Otherwise, right-click on the parent folder that we created in step 1, and choose Find Missing Folder from the context-sensitive menu, and navigate to the new location of that folder.
Relocate any other top level folders you should have one for each drive , until all of the photos are online. There are more details on reconnecting missing files here. Double check that all of your presets and templates appear correctly, for example, all of your Develop presets are available in the Develop module, to confirm that you copied all of the files correctly.
Finally, you might find your plug-ins need reloading as the locations may have changed in the move. If any plug-ins are incorrectly loaded or missing, add them again at their new locations. Note that these instructions are for a one-way move, for example, moving from an old computer to a new one, or reinstalling your operating system.
If you want to work on multiple computers, for example, transferring between a desktop and a laptop, check back for future blog posts. Save Save. Just pushed the button to buy a new computer, and was depressed about that thought of getting LR set up on it correctly and smoothly. Thank you!!! I bought a new windows computer and took my old hard drive and installed it into my new machine.
Now, my LR6 opens and says my LR mobile trial has expired. In Library, every thing seems to work. My files are all there, but when I select an image and go to Develop all I have is a pink or melon colored window.
I guess I should reinstall LR6. Pink or melon colored or any weird color, for that matter would suggest either a corrupted monitor profile or a problem with the graphics card driver. I am about to go from Windows 7 to Windows 8. My new computer uses a solid state drive for the operating program. I will see if there are any particular problems due to this change in letter of the drive.
You are quick to respond. I had not thought of putting the catalog on the SSD. That sounds like an option I really need to consider. As far as the hierarchy goes, though, I kind of like my hierarchy as is, for a few reasons. I have only nine top level folders showing in my tree. I may choose to keep those as is, and not bring their parent folder into Lightroom catalog. If so, will I simply have to go through the relinking process nine times? That is doable for me, and I get to keep my hierarchy as is.
The hierarchy step is to avoid people having a flat list of dated folders and having to relink each in turn. Your 9 should be no problem. Or you could add the parent, and then hide it again after the move. Same difference. I have performed this recently, and i have realize that, not sure why, i have lost flags for most of my photos. These are the details: I did your steps, and all looks to be migrated correctly. I checked old photos flags and I do not see it, but, instead of flags I have a whit custom color classification for some of them.
I am still analyzing what could be the issue and not sure if it comes for the computer migration or the update from Lightroom 4 to 5. Hi Daniel. Is LR4 still on the old computer? Can you confirm the flags are still on there? There are a couple of things that could have lost them. Importing photos afresh, or using Synchronize Folder could do it.
Or they could have been local flags in LR3 — but they should be missing on LR4 too. White color labels are a very simple fix. You could check back on the old computer to see which you had selected.
I still have LG4 on the computer and I have checked that flags are there. The question now is how to move. Additionally I thing that I also have lost virtual copies, but pretty sure I also have on LR4 library. So the new photos that are in the LR5 catalog — do you know where they are? How long ago did you move computers? And have you edited the old photos in the LR5 catalog?
Final question for the minute — do you use Publish Services? No I am moving from the PC to a Mac. Checking this movement is when I realize that I lost things.
At the beginning I thought it was caused by the computer migration, but it seems that are for the version upgrade. I will try to compare LR4 and LR5 libraries and try to determine. I thing that I did not edited old photos with LR5, in any case I would be small changes I can lost it…. Yes I use Publish services to flikr, in fact this is my next step, imagine if I would be able to re-link my published photos in case that I need to publish again.
But by the moment I am more than glad to have my library ok again. Ok, great. That will determine which one we choose to be the source vs. And I was able to get most of them. Now I am doing an exhaustive check, and I will maintain LR4 application and library some more time on my computer, but this will take time….
Well done Daniel. There was one change between LR3 and LR4 that flags became global instead of local. Photos that were flagged in a collection are still accessible from the right-click menu for that collection.
Hi… just found this thread in I have various Hard Drives spinning at the ready to access files. So I get the C drive D drive etc. I even have several in FAT Hi Victoria. Thanks for the post — very helpful.
I have one potentially very daft question. In accordance with the terms of the license, I understand you can use one copy of LR on up to two computers.
So when you download LR from the Adobe site for use on your second computer does it simply allow you to do so without a prompt for payment? The reason I ask is I currently have LR5 on my laptop but am purchasing a mac very soon.
So you can download the 5. Hi Victoria, I just did exactly what Steve was talking about. I have gone to the adobe website to download LR5 onto my new Mac and it is prompting me that I need to buy or try there is no download or redownload button. You can still download LR5 and reinstall it with your existing serial number. I asked the the forum but I will here as well. I transferred from old mac to new mac with maverick. L4R looked fine and everything is there.
Hi Catherine. If not, that would confirm a permissions issue, which is easily fixed. I followed your instructions for transfer and everything went perfectly. This was despite having to move from LR v3. Moving LR was the really scary bit of the whole move, but actually went a lot easier than I could have imagined. The key is to have a logical hierarchy of pictures on your PC before moving. I used an old 1tB external USB2 drive for the transfer and moved 58, pictures without issue.
Thank you. Excellent article. Is it possible to install LR5 on the new computer and move the LR4 catalog to LR5 — or upgrade the old computer first and then move it? Hi Joe. Yes, either will work. That way if something goes wrong, you only have to go back a step rather than starting over.
Also, the LR5 catalog upgrade looks for the original files to grab some extra metadata, and if you do it at the same time as moving to the new computer, it might not be able to find them. Thanks you so much!!! I messed things up completely during relinking, but this helped me fix things…. When i do, the catalog is blank. Anything I can do i about this — in the meantime i will get the trial of LR3 and then open catalog there and upgrade.
The upgrade should work correctly. It took me a lot of ferreting around to find out that all I had to do to get LR onto the second computer was to log on to my Adobe account and download. Adobe support gave me completely erroneous information, and told me that I had to inactivate the subscription on the first machine. Sorry to hear you had so much hassle John. The only hassle was with Adobe. As always I took great comfort from having your clear instructions by my side. You may not fully appreciate how much we depend on you.
I just bought a new computer and am having issues with transferring my Lightroom Catalog over. When I start from scratch on new computer and re-import images from E drive, thereby building a new catalog, I can no longer see any of my soft proofs. I must be doing something wrong that is quite simple to change? Or, I could just ignore the Softproofs, being that I have written down what I have changed on them.
Maybe I am missing other things also, but never checked to see if flags. Hi Scott. So I decided to delete all my files in my Working Files folder on new computer and re-copy them over from my old computer. I am going to also re-copy and move the Lightroom 5. Do I need to transfer the Lightroom 4 catalog as well as the Lightroom 5 catalog?
Mac is dead. All my photos are on external drives ,2 of the. Photo 1 and photo 2 should be formatted to fat Plus I need to add a photo 3 a new one Thank you Ron.
Check step 6 above. So I am changing from a Mac to a PC. I have all my photos and the catalogs on external hard drives formatted for Mac that are not currently PC compatible.
The disk space it takes up is about 6tb. Thanks for your tip about HFS. I understand that these operating systems have come a long way in therms of communication. So should I plan to format my disks to a pc native drive format after the data is backed up on a PC? Alos which is faster and more seemless? FAT32 is a pretty old file system and not without its issues.
I just purchased Adobe Lightroom 5. I currently have a PC and will soon be getting a Mac. Am I safe to do this as long as I have it installed only on one computer at a time? The license is cross-platform and allows you to install it on 2 machines for your own use at any one time. You may be my only chance! Up until recently I used Lightroom 4 on PC laptop for all my editing and i have photos in that catalog. I then got a Mac desktop, upgraded to Lightroom 5 and someone I know kindly installed all my presets.
All is going well up until now. I now need to urgently transfer my catalog of photos over to my Mac. Should the files be on my desktop hard drive and if so where do I put them on a mac? I hope I am making sense. I am so confused. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Hi Trisha. Did you get the hang of the hierarchy bit? The photos can stay on the Capsule just fine. It can go wherever you like. By default they go in a Lightroom folder that you create inside the Mac Pictures folder, but you can store it wherever you fancy.
Thanks Victoria for such a quick reply. I get what you mean about the catalog on the Hard drive so I copied the catalog. When I tried to open the catalog it said I had to upgrade and then only photos were shown instead of When I opened the preview lrdata file no photos were present. All my presets have been disabled too in develop mode. I prob should get someone in to do this for me before I make any more silly mistakes. Still got the old machine up and running? That seems to have worked and all my presets are now working again.
Thank you so much. You are amazing! All the files are missing so I guess my punishment for total lack of hierarchy is to find their file path one by one. Should only take until next week!! Thanks again. Great job! Just one little dilemma left to solve. I have managed to link most files but I now suspect that I have created two catalogs if that makes sense.
I have all the photos from my old PC transferred but the photos I have taken since I started using my Mac are no longer in my Lightroom. Does that make any sense to you at all. Thanks in advance. I really appreciate any help. No trouble, all you need to do is merge those catalogs. Back them all up before you continue. In the next dialog, press OK and all of the settings will be copied into the open catalog. Thanks Victoria. I find the file but nothing appears to happen.
Thanks again for the help. Well done! Hi Victoria, I have been reading up on your post and its very informative. I apologise if this seems a little out of topic with the current post, however I stumbled upon this post because of the file links. I am just trying to start up using lightroom and am trying to set up my files so that only my original photos are in the external harddrive.
I intend to keep my lightroom catalog file in dropbox where it can be synced. Is there any way I can set up the directory links to the external harddrive, without having to relink it everytime i swap out the external drive. From my understanding the directory names for mac os are slightly diffrent from windows, in that the external drive lettering is dropped e.
Thanks in advance and sorry if this is not relevant with this topic. Hi Nick. But if you have enough space on your Dropbox account, have you considered using Smart Previews?
Then you could work most of the time without the external drive, and just plug the drive in when you need to edit in external editors i. Photoshop or output top quality files. I am also moving my lighroom catalog and images to DropBox so that I can access the full catalog and pictures from all of my computers and they stay in sync. The entire process looks straightforward thank you.
If I move everything to DropBox and open Lightroom on a different computer, will everything continue to sync properly? Thank you! Hi Bobby. Thank you for your helpful website and this article has been just what I was looking for! I am wondering if there is a way to use this opportunity of reinstalling to make LR run faster. But I am confused when it comes to how to start off fresh but still be able to have access to my previous LR photos.
Maybe another way to ask you is, how do I make LR do everything faster? Thanks again! I read your site when initially setting it up. Hi Leslie, sorry for the delay replying. Are you into the hundreds of thousands yet?
What are you finding slow particularly? Thanks so much for replying! My new computer is fast at this point because it has a newer processor, but my old one was very slow to display photos when I would try to click through them using the arrow key.
They start out pixelated and then it would take a few seconds to display without pixelation. Hi Leslie. Aaaaah, is tiny! The biggest known catalog was 1. For future imports, make sure Standard is selected in the File Handling panel of the Import dialog too. Keeping your catalog on an internal drive is a bit faster than an external drive.
Let me know if you have any trouble! That is funny that I thought that my library was completely out of hand being over 3K photos. I have a retina display, so not sure if that means I have to go to , or if I can choose a different option. The choices go from to with about 3 choices in between those extremes. Does that make sense? If you always keep the panels open, you might get away with the next size down.
Sent from my iPad. Hi Victoria, I hope I am not repeating a question you have previously answered but here goes. I have LR 5. Since I already have LR 5.
Victoria: Thanks so much for your writing — they are always clear and to the point. I have been using a PC until now. I keep all my photos and cats on an external raid drive Drobo connected via USB2. Q1: When the photo count reached K, I saw some slowness, mainly in loading and backup. So, I have started using new catalogs for each year.
Should I continue to do that or should I combine all cats into one giant. One big advantage in one big cat is searching is easier. I have also purchased a new Thunderbold Drobo hoping it will be faster. If speed is my top priority, which of these do you recommend?
At least then when you need to search, you only have 2 catalogs to look through. For your new Mac, congratulations, nice machine!!! Is the Mac going to become your primary machine, or do you still need to access the Drobo from Windows too?
If so, your Mac will be able to read it. Victoria, thanks for the advice. I am not sure at this time. The new one will be HFS as you suggest. Q1: Should I merge all catalogs on the old machine and transfer the merged catalog to the Mac or should I transfer all catalogs first then merge? Currently, the old Drobo has been assigned the letter X on the PC.
Do I need to worry about this identification when I transfer to the Mac? Q2: I know that there a small number of photos that got duplicated into more than one catalog. Does this cause a problem on merge? Yes, I understand.
Merge first, then transfer. I also see what you say about duplicates. Will so as you suggest. Will start reading it right away! Very useful post. I found importing files much faster when I transferred files using an USB 3 memory card reader and the fastest memory cards I could buy.
I guess I will delete that file on my external drive and go back to storing the catalog in its original place. Is that what I should be doing Scott? One other thing based on that tip I have the catalog automatically being saved onto my external drive. Yeah I was kind of disappointed I just downloaded Lightroom classic and it is running super slow.
So I have the catalog being backed up on my hard drive and them moved it to an external drive and also had LR automatically back up my catalog on the external. Hey Scott — thanks for this article I definitely feel plagued by the slowness of lightroom. I seem to be doing most of the recommendations. The only thing I think I can improve on are the hardware specific ones though my machine specs out decent with 16gigs of ram and Hard drive.
Any thoughts on previews. Mine are on my local hard drive as recommended. Unfortunately, my computer is 8 years old and maxed out at 8 gigs of RAM. The SSD helps a little bit not much. I jumped on this article right away hoping I was doing something wrong and would get some snap from the app… but sadly, no. Thanks for the tips Scott. Yet another good tip that Scott seems to have overlooked is to not allow your catalog grow too large.
Hi Rob, I just read this thread trying to figure out how to get LR 6. Not so successful. Many thanks, Frank. Lightroom 6. The only option for a newer version of Lightroom Classic is through a subscription. These are great. XMP question. If i uncheck the box, can I have Lightroom write the changes on a schedule? So that they eventually get written? Hi, Craig.
I would just ask — are you certain you need those files? All your changes are stored in your catalog. Just checking. For me the xmp files are an additional backup feature. It is easy to create a new catalog with all your development settings for every foto as long as you have the xmp file along with the foto. I clearly need a new computer, now to convince my wife. How do I find the preview data files? Look in Edit Preferences to locate that folder path.
Paul, I can write you a letter. Can the Lightroom Catalog be stored on a storage location such as a OneDrive folder?
Same with the actual images; it seems that it should very well be possible. These tips were very helpful. My Lightroom was not running slow, but I used this as a checklist to just review all my settings. Thank you! Your email address will not be published. Scott Kelby. March 12, With these three alternatives, you can create and design websites with ease. Choose the best HTML editor that supports syntax highlighting, code completion, real-time syntax checking, and code introspection to generate hints.
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Bluefish is a powerful yet easy to use editor for the Windows environment. The interface is split into several pages. Do I need to do something different now that I have LR? Now what? Let it finish, and copy the folders over to that drive too.
Many thanks Victoria for these free additional Lr helps—they are much appreciated and certainly help to attain a higher level of understanding about the program and especially about transferring images from earlier versions of Lr to the current version and from 32bit systems top the 64bit system with respect to the latter, is there a difference between the two? Happy to help Ron! Thanks so much for this information Victoria! It helped me avoid a disaster when migrating to my new MacBook Pro and converting to Yosemite.
There are some minor differences with where Yosemite puts things as opposed to where Mavericks does but things seem to be working when you put logic to work. Great to hear it Alice! What differences did you notice on Yosemite? Excellent article! That can be a problem if you run a cloud backup, and even for a local backup, every time you rewrite those backup files, you run the risk of introducing corruption to the backup, so that puts some people off.
Cheers for the prompt reply! So if I only save the settings of my RAW files to xmp that would discard the second problem, right? If I store everything, the Picture Folder structure along with the Catalog files and whatever else Lightroom creates, on the same external drive then clone that drive to another external drive — would that second drive work if the first fails?
Your help is very much appreciated. Thank You,. These are the files that need to be backed up, however you choose to do so. Words cannot express how much this article has helped me.
Thank you so much for sharing. I have to repartition my entire PC because of software issues, so I am frantically trying to cover my bases on backups.
Also, I have made copies of all photos and catalogs on external hard drives. Is this sufficient? Any additional help would be greatly appreciated. Then press the Show Lightroom Presets Folder button.
You are Awesome! I would have missed that and not had copies. Thank you again so much for being willing to and taking the time to help me. Thank you for this, very helpful! The only problem I encountered with reinstalling was that I not only had to give the actual LR5 serial number, but also the serial for my original version, LR3. This is apparently because my LR5 is an upgrade version. And as you might know a program like that just compares two locations for differences and updates whichever you tell it to update.
Anyway, almost every time I do a backup the program says there are. Can you verify that this is what happens, or would these files perhaps still be important? I will just raise a red flag however — does your backup software keep versioned backups of the catalog?
Keeping multiple older versions can save your bacon if the catalog becomes corrupted or you make a mistake. Hi there! So when I backup a catalog it does not backup the previews? So if that preview file is now absent, there is no way to recreate it? Thank you! As long as you still have the original photos, missing previews is no trouble at all.
Hi Victoria, thanks a lot for the comprehensive list. I think it will be even better if we include the watermarks as well, which are in the folder. Hi Victoria. A very clear piece of guidance that helped me greatly.
However, I was shocked to see when transferring my preview files to see that they were just over GB in size! First: If I delete the previews file, will Lightroom just begin to build previews of everything as it would if I imported , images?
Or would previews just be generated, for example, as and when I opened up into loop view in library grid? If there is no big downside to deleting the preview file, I assume that I could proceed with a strategy of deleting the file when ever I saw that it had reached a size of, say, GB? Hi Mike. If you delete the previews, Lightroom will generate them as you view them. The downside is the extra time it takes to view the photos.
Thanks Victoria. I agree. Viewing speed is my priority. Mike you also need to be aware that the Develop History file in Lightroom can grow very large. When my catalog backups that execute when I exit Lightroom began taking hours to complete I checked my Catalog file size and was horrified to see that it had grown to I then Optimized the Catalog and exited Lightroom.
Catalog size had been reduced from It was a larger change making new catalogs in one session. Excellent article. I have upgraded several times with different computers and will be getting a new computer early next year. This will help immensely. My question is I have 2 WD external hard drives. I would like all of my pictures from these 2 external hard drives transferred to my new WD 4TB.
I tried it, however when I connected the new drive to my laptop, Lightroom 5 did not recognize the new drive. Am I missing a step? Thank you so much! Hi Victoria, I am currently using an external hard drive to store my pictures instead of the internal hard drive on my Macbook Pro. Is there a way to backup my catalog upon closing LR5 to both the internal and external hard drives?
Where is my catolog stored? Thanks for all your helpful info. Thank you for a great article! Very helpful. In case the laptop gets compromised. Yes, you want a copy of the entire photo folder structure to make restoration as easy as possible, in case you do have a disaster. Hi I am such a novice at the computer and have never copied a file between my laptop and a new pc.
I copied everything you mentioned onto a usb drive and then on the new pc, installed the newest version of lightroom. Now I am ready I think to take the usb drive and put it on the new pc. Now what do I do?
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