[BACKUP] export to catalog

[odinthomas]

Hi,

I have been using lightroom for a couple of years now and my personal library is growing out of hand.
I have 2 offsite NAS's, 1 home NAS and primary catalog on my pc, but want to get the pictures that i really could not "loose" onto my GDrive.

What i wanted to accomplish was to export my smart collection to a folder which syncs with GDrive and this works great the first time, but when i want to create a new backup (diff of what i have) lightroom tells me that it can't export to existing catalog

So what i do, and its really backwards and annoying is that i have another smart collection which filters out all the images that "i can't live without" and doesn't contain the keyword tag "exported".
So i export that to a drive as an catalog and mark all the files exported with the keyword tag "exported".
Then open my backup catalog which is in my GDrive and import what i just exported.....
Delete the exported catalog.
Go back to my main catalog to continue working.

Why can't LightRoom just diff the existing catalog with the one i'm exporting and merge them, or em i doing something wrong here.

PS. before jumping the gun, NO i do not want to rsync the folders, just the smart collection.

 

[erro]

Why not make a backup of your enire catalog, and the photos?

 

[odinthomas]

Why not make a backup of your enire catalog, and the photos?

Beacuse i do not want to resync 200GB+ to google everytime i do a backup, whats important is the difference from the last to the new and merge them toghter so that only the catalog file and the new dng's are uploaded.
2nd the reason fore keeping a catalog on a cloud folder is that i can use it on all other machines and sync back the edit to my main catalog.

 

[erro]

Your old DNG's that you havent done anything with since lasrt time should be completely unchanged as I understand it, and therefor not needing a new backup. The catalog will of course change, so it will need to be backed up every time. And your new DNG's of course.

So all you'll really win is the size of an exported catalog, compared to the whole catalog. I'm not sure it's a lot compared to your new DNG's?

As to your original question: no you can't export to an existing catalog. "Export to catalog" is a way to create a completely new and stand-alone catalog with the selected photos. The main purpose for this is - I believe - to be able to export a small portion of a large catalog, from a desktop computer to a laptop computer, and work on the smaller catalog using the laptop. And then when the work is done, re-import this smaller catalog into the large main catalog again, thus syncing the changes. Another way to use this is to have a laptop along on a photo shoot, import photos straight away into a brand new catalog, maybe do some basic sorting and editing, and when back home again you can import this new catalog into your main working catalog, thus syncing the changes.

Having many small catalogs is probably, for most people, a sure way of sooner or later messing things up badly. Specially if you have exported catalogs like you want to. You'll have to be sure in what catalog you are working, in order to get your changes where you want them. And what if you edit a photo in your main catalog that is also in an exported catalog? That exported catalog will not reflect the changes.

I guess you have your reasons for wanting it the way you want it, but I would suggest thinking again about the downsides.