Lightroom 3 Catalog help

I recently purchased a new computer and I transferred all my images to an external hard drive and I moved the images using Lightroom so that it cataloged everything correctly. Lightroom was set up at that time to back up the catalog to the same external HDD.

Now I plug in my new computer upload the catalog from the back up and it works great.

Only one problem. When my external HDD is not plugged in - it can't find the catalog.

How do I set it up like I had it before where my catalog is on my computer and my back up is on HDD as usual.

Should I separately move my backup catalog to my computer? - Thanks!

You need to move the catalog back to the internal hard drive on your computer. By default Lightroom stores its catalog in the My Pictures folder but you can put there anywhere you choose on your hard drive(s).

Start Lightroom and go to Edit > Catalog Settings > General and you'll see the location of the current catalog you're using. Now use Windows Explorer or Finder to navigate to that location and copy the catalog (actually the entire folder named Lightroom that contains the catalog and preview files)

Now go to the preferred location for your catalog and paste the folder you copied earlier there (CTRL +Z).

Close Lightroom, then press the CTRL key while double-clicking on Lightroom desktop icon to restart it. You'll see a dialog box pop up; if the catalog you copied earlier to the new location isn't listed in it use the "Choose Different Catalog" button to navigate to the location of the new catalog, and choose it as the new default catalog.

And don't forget to fix your backup location....

Okay - This worked perfectly! Thanks!

Getting set to move everything from one mac to another. Cleaning up.

Earlier this year, I upgraded lr3 to lr4. lr3 isn't on my mac anymore, I either deleted it, or it took care of that itself.

somehow I still have a lr3 catalog.ircat, not used since march 2012. can I delete that now?

I also have "temporary import data.db, 2-db-journal, and 2.db" files, not used in several months. safe to delete?

thx

I'm not sure what you are trrying to do??

Assuming all images are in the LR4 catalog: Yes, you could delete the LR3 cat.
LR4 will have converted the LR3 catalog to work with LR4, but kept the old LR3 catalog (for use with LR3)

LR3 won't have disappeared by itself, so you must have deleted it.

On the temp files: I've never seen those, so I had to Google.
This might help: http://forums.adobe.co​m/message/4015937
Seems you can delete them.

René Damkot wrote in post #14885799
Assuming all images are in the LR4 catalog: Yes, you could delete the LR3 cat.
LR4 will have converted the LR3 catalog to work with LR4, but kept the old LR3 catalog (for use with LR3)

LR3 won't have disappeared by itself, so you must have deleted it.

On the temp files: I've never seen those, so I had to Google.
This might help: http://forums.adobe.co​m/message/4015937
Seems you can delete them.

thx for your insight and also looking that up for me
cheers