Adobe chat frustration - help!

[Chipper]

After a problem with importing into LR Classic yesterday, I decided to do a manual back up and discovered that a previous chat on July 4th (which took 3 frustrating hours) had resulted in a 2nd catalogue starting.

In spite of my better judgement, I logged in to chat again and asked, very clearly, to be told how to merge catalogues. Almost 2 hours later, when it was after midnight, and we had selected YES USE THE NEWER UPGRADED CATALOGUE twice and I had asked if all the data would be safe and merged, he typed Yes.
I had sent screenshots through this chat.

He also told me only 1 catalogue would be there. This did not happen. He then seemed surprised when I sent him another screenshot and asking if I only needed to back up the version 2 filed manually, he then said that I only had two catalogues! He wanted, after midnight to merge them as he had already told me that this would have happened, I stopped at that point.

So, my question is, how do I safely merge two catalogues? The second catalogue will also have some edits for images added to Lightroom from before July 4th. All of my images appear in the second version of the catalogue but the size of the catalogue file, which I think contains the edits if I understand this correctly, is much smaller.

Heeelp please.

 

[sirch]

I'd like to know this too, I have seen instructions that say to back everything up, delete the catalogue and then restore it from back up but I'd like to know how well that works

BTW, I feel your frustration but you might get a bit more attention from someone who knows if you rename the thread title to somehting like "Merging lightroom catalogues"

 

[Furtim]

The process is simple enough:

1. Open one of the catalogue (let's call this 'A')
2. Select 'Import from another catalogue' and select the other catalogue (we'll call this 'B')

You will still end up with two catalogues:

• Catalogue A will contain all the edits from A and B
• Catalogue B will still be there, with just the edits it originally had.

Once you are satisfied all your edits are in A, you can delete B.

Now, this is all straight forward if the two catalogues reference different source photos. In your case, it sounds like at least some of the photo's exist in both catalogues, and you might have made different changes to the same photo in BOTH catalogues. If that's the case, you could consider writing all the edits to sidecar files (.XMP) for both catalogues, taking care to ensure the edits you want are exported last (ie. the edit you want to keep overwrites the .XMP for the one you are willing to discard) and then just re-importing everything into a new catalogue. Lots of faff depending on how intertwined your catalogues are. Plenty of variations on this theme / approach depending on the nature of the overlap.

BUT

There are some complications what depend on how you've organised stuff - mainly around the actual locations of the photographs (jpg and raw files). If the two catalogues have been referencing them in different directories, and your don't move them etc, then you may have issues - this is very dependant on how you have chosen to organise your files, so I can't make a blanket statement around this.

 

[Chipper]

Thank you David. I have done some editing in the new version of the catalogue since July of photos from before July but I have no idea how to track them down nor will staring at my diary do because we have been up and down to Newcastle twice this month for a bereavement. I don't know what sidecar files are or how to find them. Whenever I click on the catalogue in my hard drive a pop up menu appears asking me which file I want to update and then Lightroom just opens{ described in my original post]. All the images now show up in the -2 version of the catalogue. Hmm. A moment's lack of understanding trying to follow Adobe chat appears to be beyond my capacity to fix it. All a bit disappointing especially given the other stuff we are dealing with at the moment. I have just written up the order of service for my mother in law. Hmm.

 

[Furtim]

Thank you David. I have done some editing in the new version of the catalogue since July of photos from before July but I have no idea how to track them down nor will staring at my diary do because we have been up and down to Newcastle twice this month for a bereavement. I don't know what sidecar files are or how to find them. Whenever I click on the catalogue in my hard drive a pop up menu appears asking me which file I want to update and then Lightroom just opens{ described in my original post]. All the images now show up in the -2 version of the catalogue. Hmm. A moment's lack of understanding trying to follow Adobe chat appears to be beyond my capacity to fix it. All a bit disappointing especially given the other stuff we are dealing with at the moment. I have just written up the order of service for my mother in law. Hmm.

Sounds like version 2 of your catalogue is the one to work with.

If you want to see which pictures you've edited in your 'version 1' catalogue, just open it, and change the sort order at the bottom of the library page to "Sort: Edit Time", this will put the photo's you've edited most recently at the top (or bottom - depending on the sort order - the Z-A arrow thing next to the sort button).

If while in your version 1 catalog, you find a picture you want to transfer the edits to the version 2 catalogue, select the 'Metadata' menu at the top and pick 'Save Metadata to File' (or use the control-S shortcut'). This will create a small file on the hard disk in the same place as the original jpg or raw file with the same name, but with the .XMP extension - this is a sidecar file, and all it does is write the same edit information that is held in the catalogue to a separate specific file for that image.

If you them open up the version 2 catalog and browse to the same photo, you should see an little icon on the image saying something like 'this images has been edited in an external editor' etc. This just means it's found the sidecar file and the edits in there are different to the ones in the catalog. Select 'Read metadata from file' from the same menu and the edits will be brought in - this assumes the original photo is in the same physical directory on both catalogues.