Any Lightroom 4 experts out there?

[BirdsOfPreyDave]

This is probably a question for a technical forum on the Adobe site, but I figured I'd try it here first since this is "home."

I'm having trouble with the "Import from Catalog" feature.

I keep a laptop in my Owner's Locker at WDW. I upload my cameras into Lightroom on that machine, then planned to use a USB drive to transfer them back to my computer at home. Before leaving Disney, I exported all the photos from the laptop catalog onto the travel drive. I opened that catalog, and everything seemed fine with it. All the RAW and JPG files were copied to the drive.

Here at home, I can open that catalog and everything looks fine. But when I go into my main catalog and try to import the pictures from the travel catalog it gives me a "cannot copy file" error for every single photo. There's plenty of free space (> 1TB) on the hard drive I'm trying to copy to, and plenty of space on the drive that contains my catalog. I just can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I wish the error message was more descriptive.

Both machines have Lightroom 4.1.

I basically just gave up after struggling with it for a while and did a straight import of the pictures from the travel disk. Of course, I lost any developing or geotagging work I'd done at WDW.

Would love to figure out this process before our next trip.

 

[SrisonS]

I'll try and look for how to do it, but there's a way to basically point your Imported catalog to where your pictures are.

I believe that when you Import a catalog, it's still trying to look in a very specific location for the pictures (i.e. C:\Pics\Disney). So if they aren't in that exact folder (Now in i.e. C:\Canon\Disney), there will be some issues. .... I hope this is the issue you're having.

I had to do something similar when I got a new computer. It was a pretty easy fix; but I can't totally remember it off-hand. I'll do some quick looking though. But your edits and everything will be there.

 

[BirdsOfPreyDave]

I'll try and look for how to do it, but there's a way to basically point your Imported catalog to where your pictures are.

I believe that when you Import a catalog, it's still trying to look in a very specific location for the pictures (i.e. C:\Pics\Disney). So if they aren't in that exact folder (Now in i.e. C:\Canon\Disney), there will be some issues. .... I hope this is the issue you're having.

I had to do something similar when I got a new computer. It was a pretty easy fix; but I can't totally remember it off-hand. I'll do some quick looking though. But your edits and everything will be there.

You're correct. That's something I'd already corrected, though. I'd opened the travel catalog and clicked the ? on one of the pictures to give it the new path.

 

[SrisonS]

Now this is LR3, but I'm assuming that LR4 is similar.

But here's what I had to when I switched computers.....

I imported the catalog. After doing that, the 'Folders' panel looked exactly the same as it did on my old computer. And although the folder order was correct (and I think I could see previews of the pics), LR wasn't able to find them. So I went to the main folder called 'Canon Pics' (my order is Canon Pics\2010.... Canon Pics\2011.... etc), and Right-clicked it. I then went to 'Update Folder Location', to point LR in the proper direction. So now, all of my pictures, with their edits, were there.



import by Scott Smith (SRisonS), on Flickr