Merging/duplicating LR catalogs/thumbnails from diff. external hard drives

[beester88]

I have all my photos/thumbnails and main LR catalog on an external hard drive. The original photos were NOT imported to my desktop LR catalog, but directly into the LR catalog on the external hard drive. When the hard drive was almost full, I thought I was doing well by "copying" or dragging the LR catalog and associated folders with photos, all onto another external hard drive ,but everything got really messed up and it went downhill from there. This created even more of a mess with a zillion question marks.
My question is how to duplicate the good original LR catalog on the full first external hard drive, with all original photo files and folders, to ANOTHER external hard drive via Lightroom. this would be a back up to use on my laptop and safe keeping.
I would also like to know how to merge catalogs to create one master catalog. Thank you ahead of time.beester88

 

[snberk103]

I have all my photos/thumbnails and main LR catalog on an external hard drive. The original photos were NOT imported to my desktop LR catalog, but directly into the LR catalog on the external hard drive. When the hard drive was almost full, I thought I was doing well by "copying" or dragging the LR catalog and associated folders with photos, all onto another external hard drive ,but everything got really messed up and it went downhill from there. This created even more of a mess with a zillion question marks.
My question is how to duplicate the good original LR catalog on the full first external hard drive, with all original photo files and folders, to ANOTHER external hard drive via Lightroom. this would be a back up to use on my laptop and safe keeping.
I would also like to know how to merge catalogs to create one master catalog. Thank you ahead of time.beester88

Open Lightroom. Navigate to, and click on the top level folder that contains all of the photos in LR. Go to the thumbnail view, and then CMD-A (select all).

Now go to the Menu Bar (the standard OS X bar across the top of all applications in OS X). Choose File > Export as Catalogue.

This should, if I understand it correctly, copy all of your photos with notes and edits to the location of your choice.

Also… go to the LR forums on the Adobe site. They are moderated and have the best information how how to work LR that I've found. There is lots of bad advice out on the internet - but the Adobe forums weed the bad advice out, in my experience.

I've never actually done this operation - I've read that this is one way to do it.

In the same menu area there options to Import and Merge a catalogue into another catalogue.

Hope this helps…

 

[beester88]

thank you very much. I will give it a try and most certainly will go to the adobe site too. happy memorial day!

 

[snberk103]

thank you very much. I will give it a try and most certainly will go to the adobe site too. happy memorial day!

Hope it works for you. Thanks for well-wishes, even if it isn't Memorial Day here.... hope you have the day off.

 

[thedeske]

Even if you do copy the cat files and photos to another drive, you can easily let Lightroom know where they are. Control click the top ? on a folder on the left and locate the folder, etc. This should rebuild the path to the files.