- Joined
- Apr 19, 2016
- Messages
- 5
- Lightroom Experience
- Intermediate
- Lightroom Version
I need some major advice.
As of right now I have 2 different catalogs. One is on my Mac desktop and one is on my MacBook. My catalog on my desktop is about 5 or 6 years old and my laptop is only a few years old. Each one is a mess because I made the mistake of moving things around outside of lightroom very early on. For each of my computers, when my internal hard drive would start getting full, I would move pictures off of my hard drive to an external hard drive. I would keep some pictures in lightroom and some I would remove completely. Picture locations right now are on my internal and external hard drive (for both desktop and laptop.)
I have recently been linking missing folders and pictures for both catalogs, so most are fixed.
A bunch of my pictures now are not in lightroom, and just sitting on my external hard drive. I have some free time right now so i want to get all those photos into lightroom in order to sort through, edit, delete, rate, etc. I want to eventually only have one catalog but worried about merging since each catalog is such a mess and picture locations are scattered. Plus, some pictures I know are located in both catalogs so not sure merging is a good idea. I have quite a bit of editing and metadata but I think I'd rather lose those instead of losing pictures in the shuffle of transitioning to one catalog.
I'm looking at a total of 70,000 pictures or so between the 2 so I really would like to be at just one catalog with all photos stored in one location on an external hard drive.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
As of right now I have 2 different catalogs. One is on my Mac desktop and one is on my MacBook. My catalog on my desktop is about 5 or 6 years old and my laptop is only a few years old. Each one is a mess because I made the mistake of moving things around outside of lightroom very early on. For each of my computers, when my internal hard drive would start getting full, I would move pictures off of my hard drive to an external hard drive. I would keep some pictures in lightroom and some I would remove completely. Picture locations right now are on my internal and external hard drive (for both desktop and laptop.)
I have recently been linking missing folders and pictures for both catalogs, so most are fixed.
A bunch of my pictures now are not in lightroom, and just sitting on my external hard drive. I have some free time right now so i want to get all those photos into lightroom in order to sort through, edit, delete, rate, etc. I want to eventually only have one catalog but worried about merging since each catalog is such a mess and picture locations are scattered. Plus, some pictures I know are located in both catalogs so not sure merging is a good idea. I have quite a bit of editing and metadata but I think I'd rather lose those instead of losing pictures in the shuffle of transitioning to one catalog.
I'm looking at a total of 70,000 pictures or so between the 2 so I really would like to be at just one catalog with all photos stored in one location on an external hard drive.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!