Lightroom Help

[Mark Elberson]

I am going on vacation for a week and will be doing a lot of shooting. My work station is an iMac but I will be bringing my PC laptop with me. How do I import into LR3 on my laptop, do some PP and then when I get home import from my laptop to my iMac and retain any PP that I've done on my laptop?


I think the answer has to do with catalogs but I am very new to LR and adobe's online help has only confused me more!


Thanks for your help :-)

[Daniel Browning]

Here's what I do: On the laptop, go to Edit->Catalog Settings and make sure "Automatically write changes into XMP" is checked, and import/edit the new photos as normal. Then, when the images are imported into the workstation, all the metadata is automatically brought with them.


Whatever method you decide to use, I suggest testing it before you leave for vacation.

[Mark Elberson]

Thanks Daniel

Whatever method you decide to use, I suggest testing it before you leave for vacation.

Excellent advice! I'll definitely do this.

[wusstigphoto]

Here's how me and my photography partner transfer stuff back and forth (I have done this on my iMac but that really doesn't matter).


PP as normal on your laptop. When your ready to transfer over, highlight all all the images you want to move, go up to the tool bar and click on 'Export as Catalog'. iirc, you tell it where to transfer the LR.Cat file and all the images which are duplicated from your originals into a new folder. we usually transfer them onto a CF card in a USB reader or to a USB port with a flash drive (if its large enough).


Then just pop the flash card or drive into you iMac and 'Import LR Catalog', tell it where the files are and where you want it copied to.


I just did this again last night but that was good advise to at test it prior to your trip with at least one PP'd image so you know what to expect.


Have fun on vacation


Dave

[peety3]

I took the high road from the beginning, and give every job a complete folder tree and LR catalog. I convert CR2 to DNG, toss the CR2, keep the DNG/catalog/exports all in one package, and archive that bundle when the editing is done. I lose the ability to search across all of my photos, but gain the ability to move jobs across computers quite seamlessly.

[Mark Elberson]

Thanks everybody. Yesterday I did a test on one image. I exported a catalog from my laptop to a flash drive. I then imported that catalog from the flash drive. At that point it appeared to be its own separate catalog (this is actually what adobe's help page told me would happen). I then just dragged the folder from the imported catalog into my main catalog and all seemed fine.