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How do I move photos from one catalog to another?

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lbeck

Active Member
Joined
May 21, 2015
Messages
150
Location
Hillsborough, NC
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
6.x
Lightroom Version Number
6.14
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
I've successfully trimmed my bloated catalog from ~40K photos to about ~20K photos. Now I want to have "sub-catalogs" to reduce the size of my collections (e.g., landscapes, people, animals, etc.).

How do I MOVE (not copy) photos from my main, all-inclusive catalog? I've created my first sub-catalog but when I attempt to get photos into it by using the export command or import from catalog Lr tries to copy my entire 20K photos. I'd like also to move the metadata such as keywords to accompany the photos to their new home.

Thanks
 
Select the images and use Export as Catalog. Then import that catalogue into the other one. Finally remove the images from the first catalogue.

And then sit back and think if doing this is a great idea......
 
Well you're right, John. That does work. But not such a great idea.

The time consumed by tagging, exporting, switching back & forth between catalogs, deleting, repeat, repeat, is a much greater burden than keeping my master catalog together. I was hoping that there was a way to maybe open 2 lrcat files side-by-side and dragging and dropping. Or using Win File Explorer in a similar way. Even tagging photos in catalog A-> move to catalog B would be better.

I guess I'll continue to keep my dissimilar photos together. I can use keywords, stacks, and groups to do almost all that I need.

I meet with a group of other photographers and right now we're doing landscape photography. When I open my catalog as it now is I have lots of family pictures, animals, flowers, technical documentation and other stuff that show in grid mode. I was hoping to have a "landscapes" catalog to open and work only within that. I'd use my "people" catalog with face recognition to maintain archival photos of family and friends.

Thanks for your response though. Now I can stop dreaming of perfecting my catalog (further than only continuing to delete stuff).
 
I was hoping to have a "landscapes" catalog to open and work only within that.
You can create a "landscapes" collection to isolate these images from everything else. If you use keywords and a Smart Collection, LR will keep this collection unto date automatically.
 
Yes. The "collection" option works. But it leaves the-files in the "all Photographs" bucket. Is there a function that can cut the "all Photographs" into individual folders or lcrat files?
 
You can leave the Library Filter in the lock position and with one column filtered to the "landscape" keyword as suggested by Cletus.

You might want to draw a distinction between the single catalogue which is the most reliable and efficient way of managing all your pictures, and catalogues that you create temporarily. What I am suggesting is to rely on that single catalogue for everything you do, but before you meet your landscape friends you could select your landscape photos (via a keyword or smart collection) and use Export a Catalog. If you make changes while you are using that landscape catalogue, Import from Another Catalog could bring that work back into your main one.

Why a smart collection? Well, photos don't fit neatly into one category. A photo might be landscape, but also contain family members for example, and you might not want outsiders to see it. And a smart collection can be quite sophisticated - get it right once, and you can just return to it with a single click.
 
Yes. The "collection" option works. But it leaves the-files in the "all Photographs" bucket. Is there a function that can cut the "all Photographs" into individual folders or lcrat files?
‘All Photographs’ is a special collection. Photos can never be only in there, they will be in (a) folder(s) too.
 
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