With Summer fast approaching, and travel becoming easier now, many are thinking of taking a vacation. For most of us, taking photos is one of the highlights. But what if you want to edit them in Lightroom while you’re away?
There’s a few options for traveling with Lightroom, but here’s the simplest: a temporary catalog on your laptop, which is then merged back into your main working catalog on your return.
Why use Lightroom Classic on your laptop instead of the Lightroom cloud ecosystem?
It’s true, you could use the Cloud versions of Lightroom on a tablet or laptop, and then let the photos sync down to Lightroom Classic. But if you’re traveling with a laptop, using Lightroom Classic allows you to follow your usual workflow. Also, unlike the Cloud version, all the changes you make will transfer to your main catalog (whereas Keywords, Color Labels and Collections don’t sync from the cloud into Lightroom Classic). Additionally, you don’t need an internet connection to transfer them while away either!
If you want to use Cloud Sync, our free eBook on Travel Workflow will walk you through the process. It’s also covered in much more detail in Chapter 22 ‘Cloud Sync’ in our Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ book. But for now, let’s assume you’re going to use Classic on a Laptop.
Travel Workflow using Lightroom Classic
Summary: Create a new catalog for the vacation on your laptop (or a portable hard drive), and when back home, merge it into your main catalog on your home computer.
Objective: You want to keep your new shoot separate (e.g. a location shoot or vacation photos) until you’re ready to transfer it back to your main computer. You don’t need access to your existing photos on the laptop.
Set up on the Laptop: (do this before you go, while you have your home internet connection!)
- Load the Creative Cloud app and install Lightroom Classic on your Laptop. You can have two activated licenses at the same time as part of the Adobe licensing agreement.
- On your Laptop, open Lightroom and go to File menu > New Catalog and create a catalog.
- If you intend to do keywording, then take a copy of your existing keywords / hierarchy. You can learn how to in outr blog How do I copy keywords to a new catalog?
On vacation:
- Import your photos as normal.
- Do all the usual edits you want, add keywords, rate your photos, create collections – all the things you’d usually do at home!
- Think about backing up the catalog and photos while away, perhaps on a small external drive. We recommend keeping the original photos on your SD cards too until you’re back home, and everything is safely transferred to your main catalog.
Merge catalog once back: (take these steps once back home on your main computer.)
- Copy the catalog and photos to the main computer, or plug in the portable hard drive.
- Double-click on the temporary catalog to open it, then relink any files that are marked as missing, using the instructions in Lightroom thinks my photos are missing—how do I fix it? (they may be seen as missing in Lightroom as the path to them may have changed).
- Open the main catalog (File menu > Open Recent)
- Run a catalog backup by going to Catalog Settings > General tab, changing the backup frequency to When Lightroom next exits and then quitting Lightroom.
- Select File menu > Import from Another Catalog.
- Navigate to the folder containing the temporary catalog, select the lrcat file and press Choose.
- In the Import from Catalog dialog, check the folders at the top. In the File Handling pop-up, decide whether to Add new photos to catalog without moving (if the photos are already stored in the right place) or Copy new photos to a new location and import (if you want Lightroom to store the photos in your normal storage location). Since this was a new catalog, the Changed Existing Photos section is unavailable.
- Click Import.
- When you’re happy that everything’s transferred correctly and backed up, you can delete the temporary catalog and photos from the secondary computer or portable drive.
While there are a few steps, if you follow them carefully it’s fairly straightforward. You might want to do a test run before you go for confidence.
Here’s a Workflow diagram to help:
Final and very important point – enjoy your vacation!
(Note: the above is an extract from one of the Workflows detailed in our book Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ available by visiting our Shop page. Post also originally part of a Lightroom Queen Newsletter).
For extensive information on Lightroom Classic, see Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ.
If you have the Photography Plan, then as well as Classic you have access to the Lightroom cloud ecosystem including the mobile apps and web interface. For more information on these apps, see Adobe Lightroom – Edit Like a Pro.
Note: purchase of these books includes the first year’s Classic or cloud-based Premium Membership (depending on the book purchased), giving access to download the latest eBook (each time Adobe updates the software), email assistance for the applicable Lightroom version if you hit a problem, and other bonuses.
We also have a special bundle offer for the two books. This includes Premium Membership for the first year as described above for the whole Lightroom family!
The tricky part on this is “how to get the same configuration in the laptop as in the main lrc instance ?”
Because configuration items are spread in many files/folders ☹️
Check our post on all the files to backup that includes the ones related to the catalog, settings, presets and profiles:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/backup-lightroom-files/
I now use the function in LR 11 called Export as catalog. This export includes the original photo’s that were part of the catalog and it has a catalog file with all the edits and changes to the photos done by Lr. Make sure that you include “Export negative Files” (tick mark the box)
I normally export this catalog to a external SSD.
At home I connect the external SSD to the desktop computer and select import from another catalog. Point to the exported catalog. In this case, since the photos are also exported as part of the catalog, there is no need to move these separately to the desktop computer. This is done as part of the import catalog process.
It just saves a few steps, I feel that this is a little easier.
Are you taking the whole catalog Oscar? Or just part of it? There’s a couple of warnings with your export as catalog workflow, firstly that you wouldn’t be able to use Sync on the secondary computer, but mostly that Publish Services don’t go along for the ride with Export as Catalog. If you don’t use those tools, that’s not an issue of course.
I just sync part of the catalog. Sometimes I just select the photos from the trip on the laptop and export those as a separate catalog. This could be from the Hierarchy or from the collection I create on the laptop.
I am not using the sync on the second computer. Lightroom CC only allows one catalog to be synced.
When I am at home and have imported the catalog from the laptop, I then create the collection on the PC and sync this collection with the lightroom cloud. Then I can invite the people that like to view the photo’s.
You’re absolutely right. If you were taking the whole catalog with you, rather than exporting as a catalog, then the sync data would go too, so you could sync from either machine. It sounds like waiting until you get home works well for you though.
I guess I’m not following. Everything but the flowchart seems to apply to LrC only, but the chart seems to tell me to also use Cloudy. What am I missing?
Oooooooops wrong diagram! Not sure how that happened, we’ll fix it!
Fixed! Hopefully that one makes more sense!
I have a couple of additions I’d make having just made a trip to Antarctica. I already had Creative Cloud and Lightroom CC on my laptop, as I’ve been using that as my main computer. The only difference was I had my catalog and photos on an external drive, but for the trip I created a new catalog on my hard drive (I brought a smaller solid state drive for backup).
The day before getting on the ship someone told me that Lightroom uses the internet once a month to make sure the license is valid, and if you don’t have internet access, as I didn’t, it stops working. So the key is to log out of the Creative Cloud then log back in just before your trip.
Also I hadn’t realized that you won’t have access to your keyword list on your trip unless you first export them from your main catalog then import them into your temporary catalog. Thus I was unable to add keywords during the trip (I could have, but then they wouldn’t have synched up as I couldn’t have remembered the exact tree structure and words I had.
Good tips, thanks for sharing Dan!
Is there a way of reducing the width of the left and right columns in LrC, have installed it on a 15.6″ laptop, the picture is quite small on the screen, could do with it being a bit bigger really.
Only as narrow as you can drag them… but you can hide them.
Have now got a Windows laptop as well as my iMac as I am going to be away for a few days, have loaded Lightroom onto it using my second license, all good so far.
Took a few photos on a day out and thought I would try out the laptop, worked well.
Decided to try moving across to the iMac which is the main machine, exported the catalogue and copied to a memory stick, put it into the iMac, no go. the version on the iMac is a few versions behind that on the laptop and it won’t import the catalogue because of the difference in versions. Any thoughts on how to get around this please ? Can’t increase the level on the iMac as its a 2013 model and can’t run the latest OS …
There is no way to read the newer catalog on the older version of Lightroom (as you’ve worked out.)
Probably the one option, if you’ve made edits on the photos, is to Write Metadata on the photos (Metadata > Save Metadata to File) and then Import on your iMac. You’ll lose History, any color labels and Collections, but you’ll have the edits.
Not sure on the veersions you’re running, another approach (not for these ones already processed but future) would be to revert the Laptop version of Lightroom to the same as the iMac (assuming it’s still available in the CC App)