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Importing Images to the Master Home Studio Cat from the Road Laptop Cat

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GregJ

Greg Johnson
Joined
Jul 11, 2011
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647
Location
San Antonio, TX
Lightroom Experience
Power User
Lightroom Version
Cloud Service
Lightroom Version Number
Latest Version of Classic via Adobe Cloud
Operating System
  1. Windows 11
I'm a travel photographer and what I do is travel and shoot. I have a powerful laptop that handles my GFX files and I often shoot thousands of shots on the road and work them nightly on my laptop. Before my flight or ride home, I copy the edited raw files and their sidecars onto an external SSD (I do this nightly as a backup also). When I get home I copy the files and their sidecars into a folder that I name and place where I want it in my master studio PC system
Note: My GFX files have sidecars, but my Leica files are DNG and have no sidecars, but contain all the editing info I need for the transfer. In other words, I do not import catalog. I just copy the files and their sidecars into the folder or folders on my master home studio PC (and its rather large array of drives).

Then I simple import to catalog (with no further file copying at import because they are already copied to where I want them in my master studio PC drives. No exporting or importing of the catalog. That way I avoid the minefield of diddling with importing catalogs and all the layers of folders that LR tries to create (and other messy stuff I don't like).

Now I bet the gurus say that is not best practice, but it has worked for me for a decade of almost daily LR use and a lot of travel shooters and pros I talk to do it that way. I have no interest in my laptop catalog. I erase all images from my laptop when the trip (or shoot) is complete and remove them from the road catalog. If I'm shooting at home, no problem. I just copy/import the images from the camera to the home studio PC LR catalog as normal directly from the camera's SD card and don't use the laptop (if I'm near home).

The only disadvantage of this system is that I lose any flags on the transfer because sidecar files do not hold the flagging info - the catalog does. But that is not a problem for me.

But now, with the new LR, I understand there is a new file that is created that did not exist before that contains some type of editing information. If so, that is going to be a problem because I'm retaining only the raw file and its sidecar when I move to the master cat on my studio PC from my laptop.

Am I going to have to change practice? Am I going to have top start exporting the cat from my laptop and importing the cat to my master home studio main LR Cat?

What info does this new file contain that the sidecar does not have? I just came back from a trip and want to get my files off the laptop and into my master PC as described above. I'm about to try it and see if the masks and edits all transfer over via sidecar.

By the way ... Man! I love this new masking. Extremely powerful. It really helps in the way I shoot and edit. I won't be using PS now!

Thanks,

Greg
 
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The new file is lrcat-data, it contains subject and sky masks. The good news for you is those are included if you write to xmp, so your current workflow should continue to work.
 
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I found your workflow very interesting Greg, learnt a lot from it, thank you.

For me, I run LrC as my primary editing workflow in my studio.

As I regularly travel to universities and location shoots, I use Lr to import images onto my laptop and or iPad, edit and metadata, then sync into the cloud either via mobile or Wi-Fi. If I don't have an internet connection, the images and data stay local until I do.

When I return to my studio and turn on my desktop, all the files, raw edits and metadata sinks with LrC.

No importing, no missing data etc.

This is also how I sync my images and edits from my mobile, syncs to the cloud and down to classic or Lightroom on my laptop / other devices.


I hope this is of interest. Mark
 
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Mark, that is amazing because I have often thought about syncing my work flow via the cloud, but my lifetime of images are all on local drives and backed up a bazillion times. I'm not a pro - meaning I only spend money on photography (lots and lots). But I travel and I shoot. And my Flickr is open market for all so I get a lot of published that people ask for and I give it away for free.
I am going to stay in touch with you and talk about using the cloud more via LR and my travels. I use it for everything except my photography. My image files are very big. I'm an absolute res junkie.
My "studio" home PC is always a high-end gaming rig (I don't game) that I build and my monitors are 32 inch IPS 4K IPS ASUS Pro Arts that make viewing GFX MF files (or high-res FF Q2 files) very enjoyable.
My wife takes only phone shots that I scoff at and ridicule her for (but she is probably a better photographer than me!).
 
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