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How to delete a catalog?

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nIkedoni1a

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Joined
Oct 7, 2008
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63
Location
Orchard Park, NY
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Operating System:Mac
Exact Lightroom Version (Help menu > System Info):6

ok i made a rookie mistake and removed a high parent level folder from my catalog and lost all of the folders inside it. i don't know whether command z would have worked but i did some other clicking around before it occurred to me to try it. i restored a catalog from 2017-10-06 and i'm ok with that except that when i launch the new catalog (which is now the only catalog i want to use) it reads as if it's my backup catalog. my question is can i just delete the original catalog shown in the second column along with the .irdata and .lock files and then rename and move my new working catalog so it shows up in the same column as " my lightroom images". the original catalog with the more straightforward name will no longer be used but i would like to adopt the name for my new catalog to make it less confusing on what is the working catalog vs a backup.

Screen Shot 2017-11-17 at 5.43.44 PM.png


Screen Shot 2017-11-17 at 5.58.04 PM.png
 
The way to do this is to move that backup catalog to the root of the folder and overwrite the old catalog with it. Then trash the 'journal' and '.lock' files if they remained after you quit Lightroom. Then start Lightroom by double clicking on the catalog file. You only have to do that once. From now on, Lightroom knows which catalog to use.

Screen Shot 2017-11-17 at 5.43.44 PM.png
 
There is no reason to replace the previews.lrdata. In fact, it's better not to do that in this case. Lightroom automatically rebuilds this if it can't find the original, so the previews.lrdata inside the backup folder was rebuild the moment you first started Lightroom from the backup catalog. However, Lightroom only rebuilds those previews it needs right now. An image that is 'out of sight' won't be rebuilt until you scroll to it. That's why I expect that the previews.lrdata of the backup folder is much smaller and contains less previews. Moving that to the original place too would only mean that Lightroom has to rebuild more previews.
 
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