moving LR catalog ?

[ricstew]

I am having problems moving the catalog from pc to mac.....I export the cat ( 2.5) to a thumbdrive ( without previews ) and import it to mac ( lr3 ) but I have no pictures? Should I be moving the catalog or the backup or something else all together? Bamboozled.
I have some of my pictures by moving the folders.......but danged if I can get the whole thing to move
cheers
Jan

[arthurking83]

I'm no expert in LR, but I'm thinking, on the windows PC, the lrcat and db files will point to images on a windows based hard drive, if you're editing the images directly off a windows based hard drive.

So, in Windows, you will have images on P:\Photos\etc\etc.

In Mac, I'm assuming(only because I don't have any access to a Mac computer) that the directory structure is completely different. ie. not going to be P:\Photos\etc\etc.

I just had a peek and it looks like Mac has a directory structure than looks like.... /volumes/variable/etc/etc where variable is a name of your choosing

So in the PC based LR catalogue, LR is looking for images on a harddrive called P:\ .. etc because that's where they've been listed as being on. But on the Mac computer, the LR catalogue is going to want to look at a directory structure that looks completely different.

I have no idea if you can convert from one database type to another, .. and I can't imaging it to be too hard if you've kept the same directory hierarchy .. as an example

so a PC version would look like P:\Photos\todays photos\D90\kids

and the Mac version would then be /Volumes/Photos/todays photos/D90/kids

where the only changes required would be the slashes and the names of the drives where your images are stored.

if such as conversion program exists, I have no idea. Would be handy for 'ya tho.

It probably depends on where the images are stored(external drive).. and is Mac capable of reading NTFS formatted drives.. and so forth.

Switching from the bright side to the dark side is not straight forward.. if Mac cannot read any windows formatted drive(and I'm sure it should be capable of doing so) maybe you need some other program or plugin or driver for it to do so.

If you have the images on an external drive and they were loaded there when you had Windows running, can you see the images now in the Mac environment?

I had a quick peek on an Adobe forum and there seems to be an issue with LR on Mac and reading/writing the XMP sidecar files if you're files are NEF(do you use a Nikon and in NEF format?)
From my brief look there, you should have no problems as the catalog can be read across the two different computer platforms!

[ricstew]

Yikes......I am sorry thats way over my head....... but I seem to have found most if not all of them....now I am missing only about 20.....I can see them but they are not there if that makes sense. Somehow or other I now have a drive c ( from the pc ) with nothing in it cause I put the entire catalog onto the mac drive........I have no idea what I am doing but at least I have found my most of my photos.....I cant believe how much fumbling around on computers I have to do!
cheers
Jan

[Wayne]

The catalogue file is just that, a catalogue of the files that are stored on the Windows pc. If you have VMFusion, Parallels Desktop or Bootcamp with a running windows Partition, you can move them onto the Mac (running Windows) via the import dialogue in LR (Move and add to catalogue). Alternately, just copy the files to a HDD or flash drive with the file structure, and try to import from that using LR to the mac.

I haven't done it yet, I'm still accessing my files from the windows pc.

[ricstew]

I think I have it thanks guys........at least it seems to have worked. Somehow I have doubled up on files and they ended up with different names .......yada yada yada........ By deleting the duplicates LR has found the correct files ( I think )
Now I have a headache.......
cheers
Jan