Problems importing from one Lightroom catalog to another - SOLVED

StewartR

StewartR

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Stewart
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I'd appreciate some advice about a strange problem I've had with Lightroom.

I've just come back from a 2-week trip on which I took 4000+ photos. (That's a lot for me.) I took my laptop with me, and most days I found some time to upload images from my cameras into Lightroom, cull the rejects, and do some editing. So by the time I got home I had a Lightroom catalog with ~1000 more-or-less-edited images.

Now I want to consolidate that into my "main" Lightroom catalog on the home PC. I used the option to 'Import from another catalog', navigated to the catalog on the laptop which I've networked via wi-fi, chose a small set of images (the first day's worth) to test the process, and it all worked fine. It didn't put the images in quite the place I had wanted on my home PC, but that's easily fixed, and everything else - metadata, stacking, edit histories, etc - seemed to be good. I was confident that I could re-run the process to import all the rest of the images and it wouldn't cause me any problems.

Except now it won't work. I tried to 'Import from another catalog' again, navigated to the catalog on the laptop, but now I get this error message:

full


Clearly it is a valid Lightroom catalog, because I have already managed to import from it successfully.

Any ideas?
 
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Did you export the folder/images as a catalog first (rt click folder(s)>export as catalog)? If you're copying everything I wouldn't think that would be absolutely required, but it might help if having issues.
 
Is Lightroom open on the laptop? Lightroom gets funny if you try to read a catalog that is in the "open" state.
 
sk66 said:
Did you export the folder/images as a catalog first (rt click folder(s)>export as catalog)? If you're copying everything I wouldn't think that would be absolutely required, but it might help if having issues.
Click to expand...
No, I didn't. I don't understand how exporting as a catalog could make things any different from having a genuine catalog, and it potentially introduces complications with regard to file locations etc. But I guess it's something that I can try if I run out of other options.
 
Craikeybaby said:
Is Lightroom open on the laptop? Lightroom gets funny if you try to read a catalog that is in the "open" state.
Click to expand...
Ooh. It might have been. I don't know for sure because it didn't occur to me that that might matter - there's nothing in the Lightroom import process warning me to make sure that the external catalog isn't open. I'll check when I get home and try re-doing the import with Lightroom definitely not open on the laptop.
 
It may even be worth opening, then closing it on the laptop to be sure that it has closed properly.
 
StewartR said:
No, I didn't. I don't understand how exporting as a catalog could make things any different from having a genuine catalog, ...
Click to expand...
Me either... I only work with a laptop so this isn't something I've encountered personally. Just going off of recommended procedure/tutorials
View: https://youtu.be/wkSNx-0UGEw
 
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