• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.
  • 12 December 2024 It's Lightroom update time again! See What’s New in Lightroom Classic 14.1, Mobile & Desktop (December 2024)? for Feature updates, new cameras and lenses, and bug fixes.

Moving Lightroom to a new computer

Status
Not open for further replies.
R

rmstnbrgmd

New Member
Premium Classic Member
Joined
Sep 14, 2008
Messages
17
Location
Charleston, SC USA
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic v. 13.0.2
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
Although I’ve taken a hiatus from photography for the last several years, I’ve maintained my Adobe subscription and updated my version of LR Classic regularly. On my last attempt at an update, my old computer (5+ years old running Windows 10), I got a message telling me it couldn’t update to the latest version and the update failed. I have a second computer with a current processor and video card. I then installed Creative Cloud on the new computer and installed Lightroom classic. Subsequently, I removed the hard drive (D) from the older computer which contained the photo, CAT files and backup files folders and copied the folders to the empty D drive on the new computer. Fortunately, at this point, knowing how easy it is to screw things up in Lightroom, I found the tutorial “Moving Lightroom to a new computer” before I proceeded.

It is clear from page one of the Introduction that I didn't follow the correct path! Now what? Should I delete everything in the new D drive and uninstall Lightroom (13.0.2) and start over? Is anything salvageable? Help!

Robert
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
rmstnbrgmd said:
It is clear from page one of the Introduction that I didn't follow the correct path! Now what? Should I delete everything in the new D drive and uninstall Lightroom (13.0.2) and start over? Is anything salvageable? Help!
Click to expand...
It is not clear to me what your are discovering to be the problem with "Moving Lightroom to a new Computer". If your catalog and image files are stored on an EHD, the that EHD is portable and all you need to do is install LrC v13.x on the new computer and open the old catalog that is on the EHD. Lightroom should recognize that this file is from an older version of Lightroom and offer to convert its contents to the current database structure and create a new master catalog form the old.

Can you explain in some detail what you think you are missing?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Thanks for your response, Cletus. The "RIGHT WAY TO MOVE" calls for installing the new version of Lightroom after transferring the files. Since I had installed, but not opened, Lightroom on the new computer prior to moving to files, I wasn't sure if this was a "fatal" error. I now know I must double click the *.lrcat catalog to open the program. However, when I highlight the Lightroom Catalog-2-2-V10-v11.lrcat-data folder, there are no files. However, there are 2 files in the Lightroom Catalog-2-2-V10-v11 Helper.lrdata folder: helper and metadatahelper. They are both data base files. Helper contains 284KB of data while there are 34,624 KB in the metadatabasehelper file. should I select one of these to open the program?

Robert
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
rmstnbrgmd said:
Thanks for your response, Cletus. The "RIGHT WAY TO MOVE" calls for installing the new version of Lightroom after transferring the files. Since I had installed, but not opened, Lightroom on the new computer prior to moving to files, I wasn't sure if this was a "fatal" error. I now know I must double click the *.lrcat catalog to open the program. However, when I highlight the Lightroom Catalog-2-2-V10-v11.lrcat-data folder, there are no files. However, there are 2 files in the Lightroom Catalog-2-2-V10-v11 Helper.lrdata folder: helper and metadatahelper. They are both data base files. Helper contains 284KB of data while there are 34,624 KB in the metadatabasehelper file. should I select one of these to open the program?

Robert
Click to expand...

This suggests to me that you have not copied the master catalog to the new computer. You need to go back to the old computer and find it. On the old computer, Olen Lightroom and verify that you are in the right catalog file, then use preferences to locate the path to this catalog file.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Got it!!! On the new computer, the catalogs show up when I click on the main Lightroom folder in the pictures folder. However, they don't show up when I use the dropdown > next to that Lightroom folder; only the ones I mentioned in my last post appear. Very strange! Anyway, I double clicked on the most recent catalog and got the dialog box asking to convert the contents to the new structure. All went smoothly from that point.

Thanks again for your help and hand holding!

Robert
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top