I am moving Lightroom to a new computer. Old one has LR+NLP installed.
The odd situation: All my photos are in subfolders of one master folder, which contains a mix of both cataloged and uncatalogued photos. If I take the advice on these forums to use the export catalog function in LR, it won’t move the uncatalogued photos. So far, I have moved everything in that folder to my new computer, the Lightroom folder included, using Chronosync. Seeing the admonitions against doing a “raw copy” of files, I came here for advice, before trying to start up LR on the new computer.
What should I do in this circumstance? I could go through the trouble of doing export catalog of everything in the catalog, and then doing a “raw” copy of everything else, telling it not to overwrite existing files.
Other questions:
Does moving files with Chronosync count as a raw copy?
Why doesn’t copying an exported catalog count as a raw copy?
Thanks for any help you can provide. My apologies in advance if any of these questions are dumb. I did search the forums, and could find nothing addressing these issues.
It looks to me that you have done everything correctly and once you launch Lightroom on the new computer you can point it to the new location of your ‘Master’ folder. Lightroom then automatically knows the location of all the image files in your Lightroom catalogue. Of course it won’t know about the image files that are not in your Lightroom catalogue but they will be there because you copied them over with your mirror backup software.
Chronosync seems to be Mac only software, so I take it that you got a new Mac that should at least contain some of the things that were on the previous Mac.
If so, are you ready for
a clean install with manual/targeted installation and duplication of apps, files etc.?
a migration setup in which Apple’s Migration Assistant handles files without user interference?
Is there some OS overlap? Can the old Mac be upgraded to the same OS as the new one or can the new Mac run the OS currently installed on the old one?
My recommended pest practice for installing Macs (with OS overlap) is to install the OS of the older Mac on the new one and migrating the old stuff to the new computer - all within the same installation. I usually download installers and/or Apple Silicon firmware from mrmacintosh.com and then let the installer do its work until I have to tell it what to migrate, which in my case, is everything.
Earlier on, I did clean installs and then had to fight to bring back to life Apple Mail, the Keychain/Password apps etc.
Anyways before starting things, make sure to have at least two current backups.
Of course, now I don’t see Nate warning about the dangers of making a “raw copy” of lightroom, but he does say to use “export as catalog.” Maybe that is just when giving files to another person.
Sorry if I got that wrong. Thanks for your reply it was reassuring to read.
I think that is what he would have been referring to, exporting as a catalog is very handy in the right circumstances. The LR Queen advice is good as well, making sure you have transferred all the ancillary LR files, presets and plugins etc. but you are in a position to get it on all to your new machine and make sure that it all works as it should.
My experience over three different PCs (not Mac ) is to use Lightroom tools to create catalogs and move them ,not OS tools .The same goes for "importing " a catalog on your new machine. That’s a built in feature of LRC ,because LR maintains continuity . I only upgrade machines when my older PC doesn’t have the hardware for newer versions - and I’ve used LRC since V 5.5 .
It might be advantageous to not store photos and meta that aren’t in Lightroom in the same folder if you are determined to use non-Adobe tools to move images and meta with OS tools.
I hope that helps . Hopefully you have already made a smooth transition.
“Export as Catalog” does the job without requiring a lot of attention.
→ It can also rename files during export, e.g if you want/need to do it.
Manual move
A few years ago, I simply copied the archive and had Lr import it with a new catalog…only to discover that virtual copies were gone, as were all of NLP’s conversions.
Multiple sidecars present NOT TESTED, but I’d probably try this after making a backup
Make sure that necessary sidecars are present and in sync with the app
→ Repeat for all apps with proprietary sidecars
→ Careful with apps that write to XMP sidecars
Lr: Use export as Catalog
repeat with each app’s means for copy/move
manually clean out duplicates
Depending on which is your main app and what it can do, the sequence of apps will have to be carefully considered. Different info might be in different sidecars and taking the “wrong” steps could result in e.g. losing keywords or development settings.
I’ll have to get a new Mac by the end of the year. I’ll most probably use Apple’s Migration Assistant when I set up the new Mac. Everything else looks like royal pain.
A slightly different scenario. I recently copied my main1.75TB 60,000 image Lightroom catalogue to a new hard drive. I used backup software to ‘mirror’ my entire Lightroom folder hierarchy from the internal drive to the new drive which was a bare 4TB drive placed in a USB3 Docking station attached to my PC. I then swapped this drive with the smaller internal drive. I used the same Lightroom .lrcat file and I don’t even remember having to repoint it but it’s true that all my folders were in the same hierarchy that Lightroom itself had created with folders named according to creation date. If your folders are scattered around then you can tidy things up easily provided you move them within Lightroom itself.