Moving Adobe Lightroom Images Between Two Computers

Several people have asked me to explain how to move photos from one computer to another when using Lightroom.  The process is really quite simple, but there are a few caveats that do need to be understood.  First though, why would you want to do this?

Well, let me explain my personal travel workflow.  When we go on vacation, or are traveling overnight anywhere with photography in mind, we always take along a laptop computer.  We use a Mac laptop, but the same workflow will apply to a PC, for those of you not yet enlightened souls in the group… 🙂

I always take along two USB disk drives in addition to the laptop.  My current units are 1.5TB each (ie, 1500 GB), so I have plenty of room for whatever I could possibly shoot on a month’s trip.  Every night, back in the hotel room, I move the camera card to a dedicated USB reader (they cost about $30 and are barely more than 1″ square.  They save wear and tear on the camera, save the battery, and import much faster than the camera — well worth the investment).  Using that reader, I import the photos into my Lightroom catalog on the laptop.

Note that the laptop Lightroom catalog always starts off empty when we start the trip.  I do not bring along existing photos from home, unless there is some reason to show them to someone along the way.  The laptop is acting as a travel computer only, not as a repository of my existing library.  (When at home, that same laptop is my studio computer, allowing me to shoot tethered — but that is a different post).

Once the photos have been imported to Lightroom, I plug in each of the USB drives and copy the entire photo folder structure, catalog and images, onto each drive.  I then put each drive in a separate suitcase, which is in turn separate from the laptop.  This way I have 3 copies of the photos, in three different locations.  If any one (or even two) suitcases is stolen, I have a third.  If one copy goes bad (it does happen…), I have two backups to refer to.  This way, unless everything I own is stolen, I will not lose the photos from the trip.

If I have time, I then do an initial edit of the photos from that day.  First I enter tag info about the city, and the subjects.  If I do it now, it is fresh in my mind, and I don’t find myself at home at the end of the trip with 10,000 photos all to do at once — a sure recipe to assure it never gets done.  I will start ranking the photos at this stage too, giving star ratings to those I particularly like and will want to come back and spend more time on when I get home.  From the starred images of that day, I will select a few to put into my travel blog.

Note that I do this AFTER I have made the copies to the disks.  Why?  Because I have learned from experience that if I do the edits first, I will work right up to the time I need to go to sleep, and won’t leave time for the copying.  That copying is more important than the edits, since it assures I have the raw photos backed up.  The edits from tonight will be captured in tomorrow’s update of the USB drive copies, so I am only risking loss of a couple hours edit time this way, vs risking losing photos that I can never go back and reshoot if I put that off to the end and had the laptop stolen or damaged.

OK, we have done this for 3 weeks (our typical vacation duration) and am back home.  All my photos, along with their edits, star rating, pick-marking, etc all on the laptop.  I want that on my home computer, integrated with my full home library though.  How do I do that?

Well, we finally get down to the title of this post.  Moving the photos from one computer (your laptop) to another (your home computer).

Remember that I have been harping on the benefits of converting to DNG upon import to Lightroom?  Well, here is one more payoff reason — it turns the move into a simple drag-and-drop operation.

Literally, I just do the following steps:

– Plug one of the USB drives into my home computer
– Drag-and-drop the topmost folder from the USB drive to the location I want that trip to reside on my home drive
– Tell Lightroom to “Synchronize Folders”

Done. Nothing more to do.  Ain’t that cool? 🙂  Your home Lightroom will now show all your photos, along with all your edits, all your color-coding, all your star-ratings.  The only thing that does not move over is your “pick” choices.  Personally I only use ‘pick marks’ for temporary aids to editing anyway, so losing that is not a big deal to me.

Now, if you are stubborn and have not converted to DNG on import, or if you feel that keeping the ‘pick’ indicators is important, you have a slightly more complex process, but not much.  In that case:

– Fire up Lightroom on your laptop (the travel computer)
– Select the photos you want to move over
– Choose “File -> Export as Catalog” menu
– Follow instructions on the dialog and save the contents to your USB drive
– Connect the USB to the home computer
– fire up Lightroom on the home computer
– Choose “File -> Import as Catalog” menu
– Follow instructions on the dialog, telling it to move the photos to wherever you want them on the new computer

Done.  As you can see, more steps and it takes quite a bit longer, but the end result is the same, plus this also keeps any ‘pick’ flag indicators.

As always, I hope this is clear.  Feel free to ask if anything confuses you, or if you spot any factual error.  I have written this mostly from memory (after doing a quick test to verify my earlier understanding), but I think it is all correct.

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