LR4 duplicate images after catalog mishap

It's WAY beyond my bedtime and I should have known better than to fool around with this. Thankfully I didn't screw anything up that can't be undone. Hopefully there is a fast way to undo this.

I have 2 catalogs on different drives. I wanted to copy the contents of one into the other. I didn't want to make another catalog, I just wanted to copy the guts of one and add those guts to the other.

Using 'export' to my other catalog, I thought I noticed something goofy going on so I cancelled the copy/export/whatever I had going. Now I have duplicates of just about everything in the catalog I was hoping to copy from.

Is there a way to undo this or do I need to manually get rid of each duplicate? I went straight to 'edit' hoping to undo but that wasn't an option.

I did search the forum after the fact but didn't find a similar situation. After some sleep, I'll revisit this one. I'm not functioning at full capacity.

Thanks for the help.

After you have slept a bit maybe you will be able to more clearly describe your present situation. Duplicate what? Duplicate catalogs? Duplicate entries in a single catalog? Duplicate photo files? Duplicate parallel universes? Did you meet your doppelganger?

Better yet, post a screen shot of your Library module's left panel.

I think when you are Exporting/creating a new catalog you do have the option of copying image files over if you choose to do so. I believe you do, but I could be wrong...if you chose that option you may want to go to the "new" catalog and delete everything, but let us know after you've gotten some sleep...!

Good grief! I didn't even have anything to drink last night. I'm still wiped out. Let me try this again.

Catalog A is on my C drive and is where most everything resides.
Catalog B is on a flash drive and contains a specific project for school.

I wanted to copy everything in B and put it in A. (In hindsight, I think should have added the B catalog to my C drive instead of putting everything in A. Perhaps I'll do exactly that.) For reasons I can't explain, I began the process of exporting B to A. Once I began that, copies of everything in B showed up. I canceled the export (thinking copy) and was left with duplicates of just about everything in B.

Before I get carried away deleting things I was wondering if it was possible to undo what I did. Or, do I need to be very careful in selecting and deleting photos in B?

Hopefully I'm making sense.

Well, you're in pretty deep. Letting Lightroom make copies of the "B" catalog images was, well, messy, since you could have either added the images or just imported without copying them.

At this point, you may be "stuck" with deleting unwanted copies -- how you do that depends I guess on how "messy" things are. you could start all over again if you want by deleting all the duplicate images from the A catalog and then initiating an Import again from B to A (if you want to keep your edits/metadata), just make sure you don't have the "make copies" option turned on. You can have Lightroom "Add" the images and then when it's all done you could delete the B catalog (not the images) and then use Lightroom to move the files/folders to their "final resting place", that way with Lightroom doing the moving the A catalog will "remember" both the edits/metadata and also the actual location.

I didn't mean to copy them. The computer didn't read my mind!

Actually, I'm not too hosed. The copies are only in B and I had around 80 images. As long as I'm careful it should be alright.

This is another one of those learning experiences. I'm learning.

Thank you.

Just as general information for anyone who wants to do something similar: It is only necessary to do "Export As Catalog" when you want to move just part of a catalog and not the whole thing. In your case you could have simply opened LR with Catalog A, gone to File/Import Catalog and navigated to Catalog B. This would have inserted all of B into A. Easy-peasy.