LR3 - Copy Images to another Catalogue?

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GaryK26

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Gary
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My main LR3 Catalogue currently has over 13,000 images and I plan to move large groups of images to a new catalogue which is very straight forward.

However, once I have created the new Catalogue, is it possible to copy images from the main catalogue on an adhoc basis? All I see at the moment is the option to Export as Catalogue which creates a new catalogue (or overwrites an existing).

My thinking is that I will export all images associated with my camera club to a new "Camera Club" catalogue. Any future image sets relating to this will be imported from the memory card into the new catalogue by opening the catalogue and Importing....SIMPLES!

The "however" scenario would be where I am working in main catalogue and come across an image that is not related to camera club, but I may want to copy the image to the Camera Club catalogue if I think it could be a contender for one of the CC's competitions.

The only ways that I can see doing this is with a lot of faffing about involving switching between the 2 catalogues.
 
Copying an image is easy. A file can be in as many catalogues as you like - just locate the file on disk and drag into LR with your camera club catalogue open.

If you want to copy the image and its LR attributes (like edits, tags, colour codes etc) then you need to export the selection as a catalogue. Then in your Camera Club catalogue select "import from another catalogue" which will effectively merge the export with your current catalogue.

I use that when I shoot tethered for a client. Master cat stays at home and I shoot tethered to the MacBook. Often I'll tag selects and keyword as I go. Then when I get home I merge with the master catalogue which contains all that client's images.

There are some other options involving exporting XMP files but they can get complicated if this isn't a frequent thing.
 
Thanks Jonathan....

Whilst the options you described will work, they involve a certain amount of faffing about by either going to the filesystem or creating a new catalogue for a single image and switching between catalogues.

Just to reiterate, I'd like a simple (dare I say single click option) where I can select an image in LR3 and copy to another [existing] catalogue.

I guess that it's not looking too promising - unless anyone else has any suggestions. I would have thought that this is something that would/should be available in LR. Not sure if any subsequent versions have this.
 
GaryK26 said:
I guess that it's not looking too promising - unless anyone else has any suggestions. I would have thought that this is something that would/should be available in LR. Not sure if any subsequent versions have this.
Click to expand...

One of my criticisms of the fundamental design of LR is that it's designed to behave as though there's only one catalogue. You can only open one cat at a time and many settings are catalogue dependent - even some which make no logical sense.

As such, support for multiple catalogues is remarkably basic even in v5. Especially as pretty much every pro photographer I know uses multiple catalogues. In fact Adobe advise multiple catalogues to cope with the speed issues.

Which is a long way of saying "I don't think that's possible and I wouldn't hold your breath" ;)
 
Thanks again Jonathan!

Adobe are almost contradicting themselves by [quite rightly] advising that the number of images contained in catalogues should be managed to avoid performance issues. Not to mention other issues such as backup, transport, etc.

On the other hand LR is missing what is no doubt a fundamental functionality - something that should be extremely easy for them to implement
:shake:
 
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