Merging Catalogs – Stage 1 – Identifying Catalogs

In the last post in the series, we gained an overview of the process of merging multiple catalogs into a single Master catalog. The first task is to identify which catalogs contain metadata you want to keep. The easiest way to do this is to make a list or spreadsheet of all the catalogs, something like this: (Click here to view PDF list of further examples).

Let’s get started…

1. Identify the current working catalog.
   • Open Lightroom and go to Edit menu (Windows) / Lightroom menu (Mac) > Catalog Settings > General tab and note down the name, location, created date and file size of your current catalog.
     
2. List any other known catalogs.
   • If you already know which catalogs you need to merge (for example, your Animals catalog and your Travel catalog), list down their names and locations.
3. Search for additional catalogs that may contain important data.
   • Use Search (Windows) or Spotlight (Mac) to search for files with an LRCAT extension.
     
   • There may be hundreds of results when you search, because it will also find your backup catalogs, so we’ll need to use the file dates and other clues narrow it down a bit. The aim at this stage is to exclude as many catalogs as possible, ready for step 4.
     • If the file type is zipped/compressed, you can probably exclude the catalog from the list, because it’s a backup catalog.
     • If the date created and date modified are identical, you can exclude the catalog from your list, because it’s likely a backup catalog.
     • If the filename ends in -2, look for a file with the same name, but without the -2. (-2 is added to the filename when upgrading a catalog.) If you find the original catalog, check that the date modified on the earlier file matches the date created on the -2 file. If it does, you can ignore the earlier file and just add the -2 catalog to your list.
     • You can check the location of each catalog in the search results. On Windows, you’ll be able to see the folder path in the Folder path column of the Windows Explorer view. On a Mac, go to Finder’s View menu > Show Path Bar if it’s not already showing at the bottom of the window, and check the location shown for each of the search results. If the catalog is on one of your backup drives, you can probably exclude it from your list.
   • Add the rest of the catalogs to your list, noting down:
     • The filename
     • The file location/path
     • The date created
     • The date modified
     • The file size
   • Leave some additional space for further notes about each catalog’s contents.
4. Check the catalog contents and make notes.
   • Using Lightroom, open each of the catalogs on your list into Lightroom in turn, and have a look around. There’s no need to note down every single photo, but it can be useful to get a feel for what the catalogs contain, for example, if one catalog stops in 2014 and another starts in 2015, note that down. Or if your travel photos appear in more than one catalog, with keywords in one and Develop edits in another, make a note of that too. Here’s a few key places to look:
   • Catalog panel
     • How many photos in the All Photographs collection?
     • Go to Library menu > Find All Missing Photos. How many photos are in the resulting Missing Photographs collection?
       
   • Folders panel
     • Are any folders marked as missing, shown with a question mark?
     • Which folders are included? For example, do the folders stop in 2019?
       
   • Collections panel
     • Have you created collections in this catalog that you’d be upset to lose?
       
   • Photo Thumbnails
     • Have you edited many of the photos?
     • Have you flagged or star rated many of the photos?
     • Have you added keywords to many of the photos?
       
     • Do you recognize the photos from other catalogs you’ve already looked through? And if so, have you edited the photos in one catalog or another?
5. Decide which catalogs you’re going to merge.
   • With all of this information to hand, decide which of the catalogs contain information you want to transfer into your new Master catalog, and which catalogs you’ll just ignore.

Phew! That’s enough for this week. In the next post in this series, Merging Catalogs – Stage 2 – Prepare Catalogs for a Clean Merge, we’ll work on preparing the catalogs and then merging them into a new Master catalog.

Originally posted 24 April 2017, updated for latest Lightroom versions March 2020.