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Transfer of folders from one external drive to another with Lightroom Edits

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KatieB

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Joined
Jul 17, 2020
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19
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom 6
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.14 Mojave
I have two external drives. I keep all my photos on my Elements external drive. I was traveling and wanted to play and make edits on some of the folders so I copied them to my Passport traveling external drive. Now I'm home and want to organize and get those folders back on my main hard drive. When I do I'm going to presume that all the edits I made on my photo's will copy over to the folder on the Elements hard drive.
 
I have two external drives. I keep all my photos on my Elements external drive. I was traveling and wanted to play and make edits on some of the folders so I copied them to my Passport traveling external drive. Now I'm home and want to organize and get those folders back on my main hard drive. When I do I'm going to presume that all the edits I made on my photo's will copy over to the folder on the Elements hard drive.
You assume wrong. Edits are stored in the catalog, not in the images. That means that the question is how you made those edits. Did you use Lightroom? Which catalog?
 
You assume wrong. Edits are stored in the catalog, not in the images. That means that the question is how you made those edits. Did you use Lightroom? Which catalog?

Hello John, thank you for reaching out. Yes, I temporarily had forgotten this. Doesn't pay to get old sometimes. I am using Lightroom. So when I was traveling I worked from my laptop with Lightroom and did merge, copy my catalog from my laptop to my desktop when I returned. So as along as I have done this then Lightroom will recognize (no questions marks as though it cannot find my photo's) regardless which external drive I work from since the catalog from my laptop which I did all the edits on was transferred to my desktop. Correct?
 
So when I was traveling I worked from my laptop with Lightroom and did merge, copy my catalog from my laptop to my desktop when I returned.
"merge, copy"? What you need to do in cases like this is either copy the catalog to the laptop and on return copy it back and overwrite the main catalog, or -much better and safer- use 'Export as catalog' to create a catalog for the laptop and 'Import from Another Catalog' on return.
 
"merge, copy"? What you need to do in cases like this is either copy the catalog to the laptop and on return copy it back and overwrite the main catalog, or -much better and safer- use 'Export as catalog' to create a catalog for the laptop and 'Import from Another Catalog' on return.

Thank you so much for this information. I will do this moving forward.
 
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