Hi!
I just installed my Lightroom program on a new PC. I am confused about my next moves with the presets I had installed on my former computer; do I manually reinstall them?
I am totally lost as to what happens if I choose "store with this catalog" in LR preferences.
Is there somewhere I can read about this?
Thank you.
Hi Khriva.
If you're talking about your Develope Presets you can export the ones you want to keep on your old installation of Lightroom on your old computer. Then copy those to your new computer and then import them in your new installation of Lightroom.
The standard way of storing the Presets is to save them on a centralized place of your computer. This way Lightroom knows where to find them even if you have a multitude of different Lightroom catalogs on that computer and all those catalogs will have access to all the Presets you are creating. But only on that computer.
If you, as John mentioned, have your Lightroom catalog on an external drive and want to run that catalog from another computer then the Presets that are available to you are only the ones created on that specific installation of Lightroom on that computer.
If you however tick that box "store with this catalog" all your Presets will be placed where the Catalog is. In this case on that external hard drive. So then you have access to all of your own created presets wherever you bring your hard drive.
But there is a catch! If you're using more than one catalog, let's say one for Landscape and one for portraits or one for family photos then the Presets you're creating will only be available for that specific catalog you are creating your preset in. So if you like to have access to the same preset on the other catalogs as well, then you have to open those catalogs and create the same presets over again. And to me this made it hard to keep track of what presets I had in what catalogs.
This could be a good thing if you want to just have specific presets for specifik kind of Photography, as an example a certain set of presets for your Portraits catalog and then totally other presets for your Landscapes catalog.
With that said I only use one catalog now. I find it a lot easier to have all my photos searchable in one place. And I don't have the catalog on an external drive so I don't tick that box.
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