Lightroom Help Required

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Hiya folkies.

I am very much a newbie to LR - and I am now using Lightroom 2.


Starting to get my head around it a bit - here's a question. I have just imported all my photos into a catlog on LR. There are literally tens of thousands of photographs on there.

I want to start keywording this catalog, but it will take me a while. Is there anyway I can export the catalog only (not the images) on to a usb pen or external hard disk so that I can continue catalogging at work or whenever I am away from my main computer, etc. then simply upload the new catalog with keywords as I go along ?

Cheers for the anticipated replies!!

Anth
 
Yes, it's right there in the file menu, Export as Catalog, but I don't think that's the best route as you don't want to duplicate the catalog, you want to work on a single catalog and move it around.

By default LR stores the catalog in your user folder so just find that and copy it across to your drive, usb stick, whatever and then double click to open it. LR will complain it can't find the files but you should still be able to see thumbs and edit keywords, etc.

When you're done copy the file back and overwrite the original (backing up of course!).

Before you get too far down this road you might consider splitting the catalog into several smaller ones. LR slows as the catalog grows so if you have several for different types of shoot (landscape, portrait, etc) you might find things a little smoother.
 
PXL8 - ok.

Would I therefore copy the following files / folders from my picutres / lightroom folder ...

Lightroom 2 Catlog Previews.lrdata
Lightroom B3 Library.thumbs
Lightroom 2 Catlog.lrcat
Lightroom B3 Library.aglib

Cheers

Anth
 
The B3 stuff I suspect is from an old beta release.

You want the other two, the catalog.lrcat file and the Previews.lrdata folder but it's probably a fair size, without the raw files one of my larger catalogs is around 15gb.
 
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