Merging Lightroom Catalogs To Create Master Image Catalog

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What is the Lightroom Catalog?The Lightroom catalog doesn’t contain any

images. Lightroom indexes images referencing where they are on your hard drive.

When you do any work in Lightroom the changes are automatically saved in the catalog.

The catalog has two components:

CatalogName.lrcat has all the information about the images including development settings, collections, ratings, flags, etc.

CatalogName Previews.lrdata holds all of the JPEG image previews that are displayed within Lightroom.

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Why Have Photographers Created Multiple Lightroom Catalogs? Lightroom allows you to create multiple catalogs.

Photographers create multiple Lightroom catalogs for several reasons:

Travel: Traveling photographers want to work on their images from their laptop away from their main computer.

Protection From Lightroom Crash: Photographers are fearful of their Lightroom catalog becoming corrupted and losing all of the development and metadata settings.

See this blog post on how to protect your self against Lightroom catalog crashes.

Speed: The processing speed is faster in a smaller catalog.

Multiple Users: A different photographer does the post-production work and want to separate out images from the master catalog.

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Benefits Of A Master Catalog Efficient - You can quickly find the photos you are looking

for without having to remember which external hard drive, DVD and folder the images are saved.

Productive - You will spend less time organizing your files. Let Lightroom do the heavy lifting of indexing your images.

Profitable - You find example photos more quickly to show clients without having to make endless slide shows.

Better - One way to become a better photographer is by noticing the trends and themes in your work that only become apparent when looking globally at your collection of images.

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Merging Lightroom CatalogsOpen (or create) master

Lightroom catalogGo to File > Import From

CatalogFind where previous catalog is

savedClick OKIn “Imports from Catalog”

dialog box comes up, select “Add new photos to catalog without moving.”

Select ImportAll catalog settings (ratings,

development settings, keywords, etc.) have also been copied to new catalog.

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Moving Files Within LightroomBecause we have selected to keep the images

in the same location, you may need to move the images to their permanent location.

Select the photos that are saved in the old location that were recently imported from within the Library > Folders section on the left side navigation.

Drag the files to their permanent location within Lightroom.

The Lightroom dialog will appear saying “Moving a folder on disk.” Select “Move.”

You have successfully merged your catalogs!

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Delete Old CatalogBecause you have merged your old catalog into

the master catalog, your old catalog is no longer needed.It can be very confusing to keep the same images

in multiple Lightroom catalogs. For this reason it is recommend that you delete your older smaller catalog.

After your catalog has been merged into your master catalog, find the older catalog on your hard drive. Delete the catalog.

You are done!

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For More Helpful Tips For Serious Photographers

Check out the Mosaic Blog

http://www.mosaicarchive.com/about-mosaic-photo-storage/blog/