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any luck Kim?

Phoenixkh wrote in post #17124820
I was on the phone with an Adobe service tech for a couple hours.... to no avail. He did change some things so I had to re-import about half of my photos...... that took a while.

But in the mean time, right after I hung up, I went to edit/preferences and though nothing had been changed, I hit the "restart lightroom" icon at the bottom left of the screen.... somehow, that fixed everything.

I have no idea what it fixed or why it wasn't working properly but it's working now.

Sounds like you altered the Import Dialogue screen (which is where the location for imported files would be defined).
As for needing to restart, that is often the case when changing preferences. So you may well have fixed the problem but the fix wouldn't be applied until you restarted.

Hi guys. I found that lightroom 5 has used too much space on my disk. And most of them are the backups from year to year. So right now I wanna free up some space on the C: drive. I am wondering what those backup really are? Do they contain data from controling sliders for every picture? And may I delete most of them safely, just reserve the lastest one?

Thank you very much!

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/oR35​Lo

Yes those are Calalogue backups and I only keep the most recent. I rarely back them up in Lr because I store the catalogue on a separate partition which gets backed-up daily on an external usb drive

so yes, I delete older ones

ximocko wrote in post #17230730
Hi guys. I found that lightroom 5 has used too much space on my disk. And most of them are the backups from year to year. So right now I wanna free up some space on the C: drive. I am wondering what those backup really are? Do they contain data from controling sliders for every picture? And may I delete most of them safely, just reserve the lastest one?

Thank you very much!

Immaculens wrote in post #17230784
Yes those are Calalogue backups and I only keep the most recent. I rarely back them up in Lr because I store the catalogue on a separate partition which gets backed-up daily on an external usb drive

so yes, I delete older ones

I keep the last three and I write them to Google Drive so I have them in two places, locally and in the cloud.

Having them on the C: drive makes no sense, they are supposed to enable you to recover your catalog if the C goes down, not be destroyed together with it. LR puts them there by default because the folks at Adobe can't know what other drives you have, but the first thing you do after installing LR should be to redirect the location to your backup drive (and backup your photo files to there also).

So I just picked up a new computer and need to move lightroom over. All my images are stored on an external drive so I should just be able to unplug from computer 1 and plug into computer 2 and maintain the same path. As for the catalog do I just export from computer 1 and import into computer 2?

I have to check the version of LR I am running but if I can upgrade to a newer version I will, at wich point I just import the old catalog into the new LR correct?

Littlejon Dsgn wrote in post #17231167
So I just picked up a new computer and need to move lightroom over. All my images are stored on an external drive so I should just be able to unplug from computer 1 and plug into computer 2 and maintain the same path. As for the catalog do I just export from computer 1 and import into computer 2?

I have to check the version of LR I am running but if I can upgrade to a newer version I will, at wich point I just import the old catalog into the new LR correct?

Yep, that's pretty much it. Just be sure that when you plug the external into #2 it gets assigned the same letter (Windows) or the same name (Mac). But even if the path is different it is pretty easy to do the "Find Missing Folder" thing.

tzalman wrote in post #17231197
Yep, that's pretty much it. Just be sure that when you plug the external into #2 it gets assigned the same letter (Windows) or the same name (Mac). But even if the path is different it is pretty easy to do the "Find Missing Folder" thing.

Great I was hoping it was that easy.

Thank you Immaculens and Tzalman so much for helping me.

I have one last question if you guys don't mind me not so smart. Is that, on the left window we have a folder named "Backups" which containing so many backups file for years. Besides that, we seem have the other Calalogue backup file in the root of lightroom folder stating clearly "Lightroom 5 catalog". So will that file always be the up-to-date backup of catalog, and we can freely delete all the other ones from "Backups" folder?

I'm sorry if I sound annoying.

ximocko -
Your catalog is the file named Lightroom 5 Catalog.lrcat. It is in the blue circle below. In the red circle is the backup folder with its dated sub-folders. Of those backups you need to keep only the last one or two - I keep three. Each backup is a copy of the main catalog (the one in blue), but because the catalog is always growing as you import new photos and do new editing, each backup is bigger and bigger. So the last one will include everything the earlier ones contain and more. That means that old backups can be deleted without losing any important data.

You will notice that next to the Lightroom 5 Catalog.lrcat file is the Previews.lrdata folder, which is not backed up. That is because if anything happens to it LR will make new previews, so it doesn't need to be protected with backups.

If you are no longer using Lightroom 4, you can uninstall it and delete the LR 4 Catalog and its Previews folder, because when you installed LR 5 the contents of the LR 4 catalog were copied into the new LR 5 catalog.

We make backups in order to be protected if the C drive fails or becomes corrupted and the LR catalog is lost. For that reason it is not good for the backups to be on the C drive also. When you close LR and the little window asking if you want to backup the catalog appears, the location of the backup folder is listed there and can be changed. Now it says C:/Pictures/Lightroom/​Backups. Buy an external drive, connect it to your computer, and change the backups location to that external drive. Some people even use two externals, one that sits next to the computer and the second is in a different house or building so it will be safe if there is a fire.

As well as backing up the LR catalog, it is even more important to backup your photo files. If you lose the catalog you can do the editing again, but most photos are one-time things. Lightroom does not automatically backup the photos, but when they are imported you can have Lightroom make a second copy on the external drive.

What an awesome reply. You gave me all the information that I need to know. I really appreciate it.

Thank you sir!

Got this weird Lightroom problem, every time I keep putting my card into the card reader to import photos, Lightroom keeps dismounting the drive then adding it to try import photos erratically

LR4.4 + Windows 8.1

Hi all,
I have a question.
I'm working between my PC and my macbook pro.
I'm still going thru all 950 photos I took at a gymnastics event last weekend.
Folder hierarchy is:
Gymfest 2015 breaks into:
Morning ¦ Afternoon folders ¦ Gymfest 2015 folder (this contains my Lightroom catalog)

If I copied the folder to my macbook pro (to work on the photos and sort thru and reject when I'm out of the house), and do work on it, can I just copy the catalog back to my PC when I get home to continue working on them?

At the moment, I'm having to recopy everything back to my PC or vice versa to maintain an updated copy wherever I am...

I can't work directly from my USB flashdrive because it's a slow flashdrive.

Thank you

You can export the folder as a catalog, work on it elsewhere and then reimport the catalog back into your main catalog.

How do I get LR to make my images look like this?!

And yes, the guy that took this photo only uses lightroom to edit.

IMAGE LINK: https://www.flickr.com …kidkutsphoto/16​586213780/

Steven Onoja