PC to Mac Catalogue

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Footlaunch

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If I export a catalogue from my Windows Laptop will it be able to be opened in my Mac? - And how is the transfer best achieved by way of formatting an external hard drive.

Lynn.
 
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Yes, Lynn. LR is platform independent and will read it with no problem. I have a MacBook Pro and an IBM T41 laptop that I use in my presentations to show just that.

On the drive transfer...A portable product such as the WD MyPassport or MyBook drive works well, as it is readable on both platforms. I prefer to use the MyPassport style as it does not need an external power supply...jus the USB port. If you use a MyBook, you'll also need an extra outlet for power, and I highly recommend a UPS to go with it. Besides...the MyPassport drives slip right into my laptop case and are barely noticable weight/size wise.

Go get a fresh cup of joe and read on. There are options and right/not-so-right ways to do this, and I'd like to give you the benefit of the experience I've had learning to do this routinely (experience is the by product of making a ton of mistakes and often).

Just like in Photoshop, there are many ways to do something. The question is: are you planning on moving your LR work back and forth between the two machines? If so, you can set up LR to do that easily. Is this a one-way move from the PC to the Mac? If so, that's another school of thought. I say all this because how you approach this can make it easy or difficult to be bi-computerly (as I am).

Theory in practice: I move my LR between the two computers routinely. This allows me, as a professional photographer, to make use of any machine for editing or a presentation (LR IS GREAT for presenting to clients - the image elimination process is a dream using stars or colors) and if a computer crashes, I can still work.

To do this, I place my entire catalog, previews and content on the portable drive (that is backed up nightly). That way, I open LR on which ever computer, open the catalog and point the missing folder to the correct drive and I'm off and running.

If you're just moving your LR content in one direction, copy all the above mentioned to the portable hard drive and then copy it to the main drive on the Mac, and when you open that catalog on the Mac drive you're back at work.

Here's the easy way to re-find your images after the move (recommended). LR will give you gray images with question marks and digital bug boxes because it can't find the photos. Go to the Folders panel in Library module and find the HIGHEST level folder for the drive it was on. Control-click (or right click if you have a mouse) on it and select Find Missing Folder.
Navigate to that folder on your new drive or location on the Mac and select it and then select Choose. ALL your images will be found. This is the easy way.

The hard way (not recommended): Do the same procedure but on a sub-folder. I say this is the hard way because LR will find JUST that folder's images, and it looks no further. To find the rest of your images (which are still lost, as far as LR is concerned) you'll have to use this find function for EACH AND EVERY SUB FOLDER until they're all found. Not so efficient, I say.

I hope this helps. I know there's a lot here, but I've found there are hard ways and easy ways to do this.

Marty
 
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Great stuff Marty, thanks for such a comprehensive reply. Yes it will be in one direction. I photograph horse races every weekend and generally use an Epson P5''' to load, sort, and backup on to an SD card after each event. I figure to use that time to load and edit on a laptop(PC) and then export that race day as a catalog to integrate on the MacPro main catalog. I think the Epson viewer will suffice as the interim storage for the catalog. I possibly could connect the computers but I'm not too clued up on those processes.

Regards
Lynn
 
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It sounds like you have a couple of approaches to moving the data/catalogs. I'm putting the query in the GMCD (gray matter computing device) for a bit and will get back later today. Having done this before, I'll proffer the most efficient way first.

MG
 
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MG, a friend of mine does something very similar to you but has just started to use USB pen drives as they are now big enough to contain his shoots !
 
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Nik - How do they say in Guiness land...BRILLIANT! With the cost of 16gb pen/thumb USB drives now nicely in the disposable income range, an excellent solution, notwithstanding the fact that the G-shock factor of those little buggers is off the charts, much more resilient than any hard drive.

Now, back on you, Footlaunch.
Regardless of media used to transfer, the process you outlined earlier is the cleanest method, providing you create a new catalog for each new event and import that to your Mac. (I've not tried to import one catalog to another that has parts of it previously imported to the receiving catalog. I don't relay recommendations unless I've lived through them already.)

My earlier recommendation stands - make sure your external HDD drive/thumb drive is read/writable to both the PC and Mac and tested as such. Don't assume anything.

Marty
 
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Thanks again Marty, I will have to wait a week to try it out, double booked with a wedding for tomorrow so I have an accomplice to do the races for me and I think I'll just leave him to store the whole day on his card.

Cheers
Lynn
 
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As a resolution to transferring images editted on site on a PC laptop I went out a purchased a WD My Passport Studio 32'GB drive with the intention of having my horse race pics on a catalog on that device to swap between the laptop and the Mac pro. Of course there is fly in the ointment there as it is formatted for Mac. I have found that Mac Drive 7 is a bit of software that will allow you to read and write a Mac formatted drive on a PC.

Anyone tried to run a LR catalog through it?

Lynn
 
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Probably better to reformat at FAT32 which both OS's can read/write natively. I can't vouch for MacDrive, but someone using the Paragon NTFS drivers to do the same thing the other way round had some very weird corruption problems, so I'd probably leave that out of the mix personally.
 
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Too late Victoria! I downloaded a trial and it worked a treat. The drive supports Firewire but the laptop doesn't and that makes it a bit slow. Not as slow as me having to do my editing on the Monday morning after the race day.

The drive shows up now in "my computer" as My Passport with a cute little Mac Drive 7 thingy hanging off it, navigate to the catalogue and off it went.

Geez has this been a long road!

Lynn
 
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Ah well, just make sure you back up! It'll probably be fine, but if something goes wrong, it's probably a good place to look.
 
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Forgot to say thanx for your reply Victoria, and to Marty as his first reply was very helpful. As a back up I export each race event back to my main computer as a catalogue and maintain two identical catalogues. Seems to work pretty well with only a few files per export and overwrite the existing files in the main computer each time.

regards
Lynn
 
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Footlaunch said:
Too late Victoria! I downloaded a trial and it worked a treat. The drive supports Firewire but the laptop doesn't and that makes it a bit slow.
Click to expand...
If you are not sure to buy... Not supporting security and such, FAT32 is very fast. My internal photo drive on my MacPro is FAT32! So, others Windows based on the lan can access when needed.
 
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Erm, Denis, your Windows machines could access it over the LAN even if it was HFS.
 
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Victoria Bampton said:
Erm, Denis, your Windows machines could access it over the LAN even if it was HFS.
Click to expand...
My Windows machines CAN access it over the LAN but IT is FAT32 formatted!
  1. Internal HD1: HFS — Mac OS, Catalog
  2. Internal HD2: NTFS — WinXP
  3. Internal HD3: FAT32 — Photos Import/Export
 
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Denis Pagé;4296' said:
With write abilities natively? :roll:
Click to expand...

Over the network, yes, because you have the Mac OS in between to do any necessary writing to disc. It's only if it's directly connected that it can't write.
 
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Victoria Bampton said:
Erm, Denis, your Windows machines could access it over the LAN even if it was HFS.
Click to expand...
OK! You made me wonder a moment why I formatted my third one FAT32 on the MacPro in the first place... :shock:
Windows (via boot camp) is on the second internal drive with the Photoshop licence and some other programs I use needing access to the same files as MacOS.
devbobo.gif
 
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LOL Denis.
 
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