moving catalogues and best way to save files

[maryhee]

HELP!!I started using lightroom on and off since january and i have to say it's been frustrating me. i think i lost the editing work i did on all the pics that i took since january.

can someone pls help me figure out how to save and move the catalogues from one location to another so that you preserve all the changes made? eg. i had originally created catalogues in my C drive but moved all the pics to my external hard drive. how do i retrieve the changes i made while the pics were catalogued in my C drive? should i be clicking on a link at the start when i'm orginally importing the pics into lightroom? pls help!! hours of work lost....

also, as i was experimenting and trying to figure things out, i lost all the catalogues for the pics that are still in my C drive. when i re-imported those pics/files, all the changes were missing (i'm assuming b/c the catalogues went missing). is there a way to retrieve this somehow?


thank you,
mary

 

[Denis Pagé]

Welcome to Lightroom Forums Mary!

First, do you still have a cataloge for the images you moved to the external? If you do, double-click it to open and in the folders panel right-click the top most level folder and choose "Find missing folder" and navigate to where you moved the images on the external drive. If you kept the folder hyerarchy, all will update and you will be able to work as before. If you have more than one top level folder, repeat for each. By default, all adjustments are kept in the catalog. Reimporting is almost always the wrong solution.

For your other catalogs, try to find files with the .lrcat extension (LRCAT).

 

[dj_paige]

First, re-importing is a no-no. This is the cause of all your problems. Lightroom does not automatically save your edits, keywords and metadata to the files. So, if you have not specifically told Lightroom to save your edits, keywords and metadata to the files, then this information is not saved to the files themselves (LR does save this information in its catalog file). When you re-import, Lightroom thinks these are totally new photos that it has never seen before. And even if you did tell LR to save info to the photo files, there is a lot of information that cannot be saved this way and is lost if you re-import, hence my statement that re-importing is a no-no.

In the future, these problems can be avoided by moving files and folders using Lightroom's folder panel. Although you can move the photos/folders using Windows and then reconnect, beginners are much better off moving files and folders inside of Lightroom, in my opinion. Same goes for renaming files and folders. And by the way, you don't move the catalog ... you are moving the photos, but doing so using Lightroom.

Did you ever make a backup of your catalog, before the moves? If so, you need to find this backup. Did you create multiple catalogs? Again, for beginners, a single catalog is best, in my opinion.

Please read The Lightroom Starter Kit and 1' Things I Wish I Could Tell Every New Lightroom User, paying special attention to the descriptions of how Lightroom's Library Module (catalog) works.

 

[maryhee]

thanks guys for your responses. i think i learned more about lightroom in the last 24 hrs than i did in the 3 months that i've been using it!