Page 31 - Lightroom Magazine Issue 27

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Following up from last month’s column, I want to lay out the case for those who might want to start over with a brand-new Lightroom catalog, and how to go about pre- serving as much of the work stored in the old catalog as possible (so that you can bring it into a new catalog). Warning, this is as close to the nuclear option as there is, so this isn’t to be taken lightly. In fact, if you’re considering this route, you might be better off reading my column in Issue 26 first to learn all of the ways you can take control of your current catalog, and whip that into shape instead of starting over. If you still want to proceed, though, then let’s get to it.
When I hear from people asking about starting over from scratch, it most often stems from the fact that they didn’t fully understand how Lightroom worked before they started. They don’t like how their photos are currently organized, and they don’t want to do the reorganizing in Lightroom, or they just have such a mess in their cata- log (unorganized folder structure, missing/offline photos, photo duplications, etc.) that it feels easier to completely cut their losses and start fresh. For some folks, starting over like this has been a huge relief and allowed them to move forward from a better place. If any of those descriptions resonated with you, then perhaps you’re a good candidate for a do-over too.
know before you go
It’s important to remember a few points to help you evaluate this course of action: First, you know your photos aren’t actually in Lightroom, and that when you open Lightroom, you’re opening a database that contains information about your photos, right? So, if feeling disorganized with your photos is your primary reason for wanting a new catalog, you must realize that you’ll still need to do the manual work of getting your photos organized outside Lightroom somehow. For some folks, it can feel a lot easier to do all reorganization tasks in a more familiar file browser (Finder, Explorer, Bridge, etc.) than using Lightroom, and I can appreciate this. Second, while it’s possible to write almost all the data
stored in the Lightroom catalog to each photo’s XMP metadata (so that this data can be transferred to the new catalog later), there are some pieces of data that cannot be written to XMP, such as:
• Flags
• Virtualcopies
• Regularcollectionmembership
• Alltheindividualhistorystepsstored in the History panel.
This means that, if you create a new catalog and simply re-import all your (reorganized) photos from scratch, you won’t find those pieces of data in the new catalog.
For many people, this isn’t a showstopper. If you’re relatively new to Lightroom, you may not have taken advantage of those features, so there’s little or nothing to lose. In fact, if you haven’t done much work at all in your current catalog, or you’re not in the least bit wor- ried about preserving any work from your old, messed-up catalog, you can stop reading now, go delete that sucker, and start over. If, however, you’ve been a heavy user of virtual copies, collections, or flags, then that might make you pause.
All of the individual old history steps aren’t that impor- tant. Ultimately, all that matters are the final sets of Develop settings, and those settings can be written to XMP, so no real loss there. Virtual copies can be preserved as snapshots, which can be written to XMP, so with a little work, you can preserve those in a new format. Similarly, you could convert flags to star ratings (such as Pick flag = 1 star), which can also be written to XMP and brought over to the new cata- log. There’s no easy way to convert regular old manually made collections though, so you’d have to rebuild those in the new catalog. Smart collection settings can be exported in a format that can be imported into another catalog, so those can be saved. Collection sets would have to be created manually. Oh, and if you use Publish Services, those would also have to be manually re-done from scratch, too. Are you starting to see why I said this should not be taken lightly?
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