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[The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost]
Hi, and welcome to this episode of The Complete Picture.
My name's Julieanne Kost, and today we're going to find out how to take
multiple, individual catalogs and combine them into one master catalog
because I'm finding that this is happening a lot where people have started off with Lightroom
using multiple catalogs, like maybe one catalog per client,
and now they've gotten to the point where
they really don't want to manage all those individual catalogs.
They just want to use one big catalog, like a master catalog,
and put all of their clients in that single master catalog.
And I would have to agree that that's a much easier way to work.
I prefer to work that way just because I don't want to deal with a bunch of different catalogs,
and I want to be able to search through all of my images at one time,
and you can only search in Lightroom through your open catalogs.
So, it's much better for me if I have a master catalog that has all of my photo shoots in it.
So, that's what we're going to do today, and it's actually really, really easy.
So, let's take a look at what I've got on the hard drive just so that we're clear.
I've got an individual catalog and a master catalog.
Inside the individual catalog, basically I just have a folder called "Iceland."
And inside of there, I've got a bunch of images that I shot in Iceland and the Iceland catalog.
All right? So, when Lightroom makes a catalog, it makes two files,
the lrcat, that's the catalog, and the lrdata, which those are all your preview files.
So, I'm going to go ahead and just open this for one moment by double clicking on it.
That will launch Lightroom and open up this Iceland catalog
because I just want to show you a few things that are quite important.
So, first of all, I have made changes to these images,
not only in the Develop Module, but I've also made changes as far as
I've added key words, I've added my metadata.
If we look here, I do just have a single folder of images.
But if we go down to the Collections area, you can see that I've got
a number of different collections, and in fact, in those collections
I have virtual copies because I wanted to create a black and white collection,
but I also wanted some of these images to be in other collections in color.
So, the two things that are super important are these virtual copies and these collections,
and the reason that I'm pointing them out is because if you don't do the import
the way that I'm going to suggest you do, if you just create a master catalog
and start importing your photos as opposed to importing the catalogs,
any virtual copies in any collections that you've made are not going to be imported.
And I want all of those imported.
It's very important to me, so I want to make sure that I do that.
So, before I go back to the Finder, I actually have a master catalog,
and I was just going to import this catalog into it.
But if you don't have a master catalog, if you're starting from scratch,
you just have like a hundred individual catalogs,
the easiest way to make the master catalog is just to select "File"
and "Make a New Catalog."
Name it your master, place it where you want to keep it
and that will become your master catalog
that you will then import all of the other catalogs into.
For now, I'm going to go back to the Finder for one moment,
go to my master catalog.
You can see that in my master catalog it's very easy.
I've got my catalog plus my photos,
and here's the different shoots.
So, let's go ahead and open up that catalog.
Now, it had to close the Iceland catalog
because you can only have one catalog open at a time.
So, it will close that one and go ahead and open up this master
so that we can import the Iceland catalog into it.
Okay, before we import the Iceland catalog, let's just look for a minute.
We've got our folder structure, 2011, and here's all of the photographs
each in their own shoot, so this might be 2011.
These would be the different weddings or the different portrait sittings that you had.
And then we have a collection, just one of them, called "Portfolios."
And so, I haven't been too heavy in this master collection, but let's go ahead
and go to the file menu and select "Import From Catalog."
Again, not Import Photos, we want that whole catalog.
We're basically going to do a database merge here.
We're going to take the small Iceland database and merge it into my master catalog.
So, let's go find that.
We'll go to my desktop, go to my merging catalogs folder.
We'll go find that individual Iceland catalog, double click on it, and it's as easy as that.
Lightroom's going to bring up one dialog box.
It's going to tell me how many photos there are, and it's going to ask me
how I want to handle the files.
Well, these images I've already copied onto this drive.
So, they're local and I don't want to make a copy of them.
They are where they are, and I want them there.
So, I'm just going to say to add the new photos to the catalog without moving.
It gets a little more complicated if you haven't been really organized with your catalogs,
meaning if you've got the same sets of files in multiple catalogs,
that's when you might get yourself into trouble.
What will happen is Lightroom will say "Hey, what do you want me
to do with these duplicate files?"
"Do you want me to replace them?"
"Do you want me to do nothing?"
"Do you want me to use the old settings or the new settings?"
In which case, if you're not sure, you've got the checkbox
to preserve the old settings as a virtual copy.
But I don't think most of you will run into that situation.
I mean, if you were using one catalog per photo shoot,
then it should be pretty clear cut that you're just importing each shoot into a master catalog.
There shouldn't be a lot of overlap with photos that are in multiple catalogs.
All right, so I'm just going to simply click on "Import" and import that catalog.
Again, not just the photos but the whole catalog.
And look what happens, we can see right here we've got this Iceland collection coming in.
Fantastic. And as soon as it's finished, we'll go ahead and reveal
all the collections in there.
It's also updating the key words, you'll notice, which is really quite nice.
So, it's doing a database merge of the key words.
So, all of your key words in the single catalogs will now be imported
into this master catalog.
Excellent. Right over here, we've got that black and white collection,
and you can see all of the virtual copies came over as well.
Now, the only kind of odd thing right now is that this Iceland folder,
of course, because I told it to leave the files where they are,
the Iceland folder is not in my 2011 folder.
Well, that's so easy to take care of, right?
We can just click on this folder and drop it into 2011.
Now, let's go back to the Finder for a minute and look at what happened.
If we go to the individual catalog, there are no longer any files there.
If we go to the Lightroom master catalog, 2011, where I just moved that in Lightroom,
you can see there's the Iceland folder.
And in fact, there's the Iceland catalog.
Now, at the very end of this, we're going to import one other catalog,
and I'm going to show you a different option.
But then at the very end, I will show you that you can actually get rid of these,
but I wouldn't get rid of these catalogs until I actually create a backup of my master catalog
just because I always like to make sure that I have a backup of everything I do.
Okay, so let's go back to Lightroom, but this time,
I'm going to import from my catalog, but I just wanted to show you the scenario
of importing from a different drive.
So, in this case, I'm going to a secondary external drive.
We're going to go to this Copenhagen folder.
You can see that there's a catalog in here, and there's some photos in here.
So, if I want to go to the catalog and select the Lightroom catalog,
we double click on that.
It's going to prepare to import it.
It brings up the same dialog box, but here, you might actually choose a different option.
Here you might actually copy the new photos to a new location.
It depends, right? If you want your original photos
to stay on that external drive, then just add the new photos to the catalog without moving.
But if you want Lightroom to copy those photos to a new location
then go ahead and select that, click "Choose."
We'll go to the desktop.
We'll go to the merging catalogs, right here to the master catalog, 2011,
and I'm just going to select that and then hit "Enter" or "Return."
So, that is my chosen folder.
And you'll notice I didn't put it in another subfolder
because it's already going to be in a folder called "Copenhagen Folders."
All right, and then we'll just go ahead and click "Import."
So here, I'm importing from an external drive,
and I've told Lightroom to copy the files from that external drive
and put it on my internal drive here.
You don't have to do that, obviously, but that was just what I chose to do
because I wanted to show you how that worked.
And then I also just wanted to quickly show you that once these images come in,
of course, all of the changes that I made come in with it
because I imported it from a catalog.
We've got all of the collections.
I've got a Tivoli collection here that I created in the Copenhagen photos.
The only thing I don't like is just the name of it, but that's easy
because I can just right mouse click and we can rename any folder
because the other ones don't say "photos" after it.
So, I would just take that off, click "Save" and there we have it.
Once all of these catalogs are merged or depending on how many you have,
maybe you want to do five and then back this up.
It's up to you, but we want to set up a backup schedule.
So, let's go into the Lightroom menu and come to Catalog Settings.
If you were on Windows, you'd go into the Edit menu.
Go to your Catalog Settings and then underneath the General area
you can tell Lightroom how often you want to backup the catalog.
So, while I'm going through this process, I'm going to select
"Every time Lightroom exits"
so that I can import a few catalogs and then quit Lightroom
and then it will run its scheduled backup, or at least it will prompt me to.
So, I'm going to say "Every time Lightroom exits"
and in fact, this is also very handy information as well.
This shows you where your master catalog is if you ever forget where you've saved it.
We'll close that and now I'll quit and you'll notice that when I quit,
it asks me to backup, and it also asks me where I want to back up
the backups for the master catalog, which is pretty darn important
because let's think about this.
If I've got my backups on the same drive as my primary catalog
and I lose that drive, like if it fails,
I'm going to lose not only the primary catalog but also the backups.
So, I would highly recommend if you have a secondary drive to choose
that secondary drive here and have Lightroom create the backups
on a different drive from where your master active catalog is.
All right, and then you would just click "Backup."
Once you've done that and it backs up this catalog,
then you can go ahead and delete those small individual catalogs.
So, for example, I would go to my individual catalog here.
I don't need that folder anymore, so we can delete it.
I'd go to the master catalog, to 2011.
Remember, in Iceland this is where the catalog was.
Well, I don't need that anymore, so we can go ahead and just drag that to the trash.
We could also go over to our other drive and to go Copenhagen
and depending on making sure that we had a different backup somewhere else,
but if we no longer needed this catalog, we could go ahead and throw that away as well
knowing that we have in our Lightroom master catalog now a backup just in case.
Excellent. I hope that clarifies the question of how you take
multiple individual catalogs and merge them into one master catalog.
My name is Julieanne Kost. Thanks for joining me
on this episode of The Complete Picture.
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LR3 - Merging Individual Lightroom Catalogs into a “Master” Catalog
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About This Episode
In this Episode of The Complete Picture Julieanne demonstrates how to combine individual Lightroom catalogs into a single, “Master” Lightroom catalog to simplify a photographers workflow and enable multi-shoot searching.
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Runtime : 00:12:09
Added : 07/13/2011
About this show
The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost
Join Julieanne Kost, Digital Imaging Evangelist at Adobe Systems. In each episode, you'll obtain valuable insights and in-depth information on a variety of topics covering both Photoshop and Lightroom.
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