How To Merge Lightroom Classic Catalogs

Many photographers use Lightroom on two computers. A typical scenario is the photographer who uses a desktop computer at home, and a laptop while traveling. In this scenario the question most photographers have is what’s the best way to merge their Lightroom Classic Catalogs when they get home?

Merging Catalogs is a two step process.

1. Move the photos from your laptop to your main computer’s hard drive.

2. Import the Catalog used on your laptop into your main Lightroom Classic Catalog.

Here’s how you do it.

Before you go

Set up Lightroom Classic on your laptop. My preference is to start with an empty Catalog (i.e. one with no photos in it). This means you won’t create conflicts caused by duplicate images when you merge it with your main Catalog. Give the Catalog on your laptop a name, something like Temp Catalog or Travel Catalog, whatever works for you.

While you are away

While you are away, import your photos into your travel Catalog. Feel free to develop your photos, add keywords, create Collections and Collections Sets. What ever you do here is carried over to your main Catalog without problems or conflicts.

For organizational purposes, it’s easiest if you create a hierarchical folder and Collections structure. That means you create a single top level folder to contain your photos, and a single top level Collection Set to contain any other Collection Sets, Collections or Smart Collections you may create. This makes things much easier when you merge your Catalogs back home.

For example, when I was in India earlier in the year I created a folder called Rajasthan Photo Tour 2018.

That top level folder contained eight more folders that held all the photos taken during the trip.

Similarly, I created a top level Collection Set called Rajasthan Photo Tour 2018 and placed all my other Collection Sets and Collections inside it.

When you get back home

This is how you merge your Catalogs when you get back home.

1. You have two options , depending on whether you saved your photos on your laptop’s internal hard drive or an external hard drive.

Internal hard drive: Move your photos and travel Catalog from your laptop’s hard drive to the hard drive that you use to save all your photos on (which is usually an external hard drive). When moving your photos place them in the appropriate folder according to the folder structure you use. Use Windows Explorer (PC) or Finder (Mac) to move folders. There’s no need to worry about Lightroom losing track of where your Folders are, we’ll reconnect them later.

External hard drive: If your photos are saved on an external drive all you have to do is copy the travel Catalog to the same external hard drive. If it’s there already there’s nothing else to do at this stage.

Learn more: How To Organize Photos For Lightroom Classic

2. Connect your external hard drive to your main computer. Double-click your travel Catalog to open it. If you use an older version of Lightroom on your laptop you may experience a delay while Lightroom updates the Catalog.

If you copied the photos from your laptop’s internal drive then Lightroom won’t know where they are saved. You can confirm this by looking at the Folders panel.

Here’s an example from another trip away. Macintosh HD is the name of my laptop’s internal hard drive. The question marks next to the folders below indicate that Lightroom can’t find them in the expected location.

To resolve this, right-click on the top Folder and select Find Missing Folder. Navigate to that Folder’s new location and click the Choose button once you’ve found it. Repeat for any other Folders if required.

If your photos were originally saved on the external hard drive all you have to do is move the top level folder to the hard drive where the photos in your main Catalog are saved. Do this using the Folders panel so Lightroom knows where the photos are.

3. Close the travel Catalog.

4. Go to File > Open Catalog. You’ll need to navigate to the location where your main Catalog is saved, so it’s helpful if you know where that is (the default location is Pictures/Lightroom on both PC and Mac). As Lightroom can only open one Catalog at a time it automatically saves and closes the current Catalog.

5. Go to File > Import from another Catalog. Find your second Catalog and click Choose.

6. The Import from Catalog window opens. Tick the All Folders box and set File Handling to Add new photos to catalog without moving (see below). Click Import to start the merging process.

7. Finally, you need to a bit of cleaning up. Any Collections or Collection Sets from the imported imported Catalog are placed at the top level of your Collections structure in your main Catalog. Move the top level Collection Set you created earlier to the appropriate place in your Collections hierarchy.