MacBook Pro meltdown: help preserving LR work from old MBP on new MBP?

[singaporescott]

I am currently on a 3-week editorial shoot through Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. This morning my MBP screen died (OSX 1'.4.1) -- essentially, the screen remains black when starting-up. The machine makes the boot-up sound, the hard drive is running, but the screen remains black (nor is the Apple logo on the lid illuminated). This is a pretty big problem for me as I am in the middle of a big shoot.

I went to the Mac shop in Phnom Penh, Cambodia this morning and they diagnosed the issue as a spoiled VGA card that will take 2+ weeks to order, replace, etc. So I had to bite the bullet and by a new MBP (OSX 1'.5.5) so I could keep on going on my shoot (the sting of this un-budgeted expensive purchase is only now starting to subside).

I can download to my new MBP a trial version of LR2.3 from the internet to hold me over until I get home, so I can continue to shoot with my D3 and D3x on this assignment.

I have all my photo files shot on this assignment backed-up on two different hard drives, so there is no issue there.

And the Mac technician helped me to remove the hard drive from the old MBP, hook it up to a different machine and extract my other critical files including my Lightroom 2 Catalog 2.lrcat and Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata files (as I had over 2',''' photo files archived in LR with various catalogues, flags, cropping, presets, etc from multiple hard drives, on my old MBP).

OK, so here is what I am trying to figure out: I want to be able to bring all those 2',''' files back into LR on my new MBP while preserving all that work I've done on each of the photos. As I mentioned above, I have the .lrcat and .lrdata files -- I am just not sure if its possible, or how to work with these alongside my photo files in LR2 so that all the work (particularly on the 2,5'' photos from this shoot so far that I'd already spent a lot of time sorting, flagging, cropping, manipulating, etc).

Can anyone help to shed some light on how to do this? I am pretty stressed and really hope its possible...

Thank you, Scott

 

[Kiwigeoff]

You can d/l the 2.3RC as mentioned. Place the folders with the .lrcat and.lrpreviews on the new Mac or if you like keep them on the external. Double click on of the .lrcat files and LR will open with that catalog, you can access the others from File>Open Catalog and pointing to the one you want.
I would recommend Starting a new catalog and importing all the other catalogs into it for simplicity though.

 

[Brad Snyder]

Geoff gives excellent advice here. The only issue you may be likely to encounter is if the relative addressing of the original image files changes somehow between the setups. It will be extremely helpful if you can maintain the pathnames to the images files identically.

I.e., if the old setup had the image files in a folder tree such as x:\images\2''9\February\..., and so on, if you can replicate that exactly on the new setup that will make things much easier. (Forgive me if the Mac directory syntax is wrong, but you know what I mean)

The *.lrcat database file maintains links/pointers to the original image files, which will be temporarily broken should those image files move. There's a mechanism for relinking, but sometimes it can be a lot of manual effort depending on cirucmstances.