Moving Catalogs and Files From One Computer to Another -No Missing Photos

[pflower]

I am now a bit confused as to how LR works - although I have to say that in this case I have absolutely no problems - so this is of general, academic interest.

I have just returned from a long trip through Rajasthan with a catalog and files which I created on my Macbook Air.  The Catalog (with generated previews) and the photos  were created in two folders (the Photos folder having numerous subfolders) at Macintosh HD/Users/myname/Pictures.

I then simply copied both those folders onto my main catalog drive which is an external drive called Lightroom Catalog attached to an iMac.  The folders were copied directly into the path Lightroom Catalog/Main Catalog/2016/02-16/.

I then opened the newly copied catalog on the iMac expecting to find all the photos were missing, but could be easily found by identifying the parent Photos folder.  I was somewhat surprised to find that all the photos were present when I opened the catalog on my main computer and properly referenced on the main external drive.

I had understood that Lightroom catalogs identified photos on a full path starting at the HD level.  Having completely changed that path by copying the files over to the new disk I expected LR to complain that it couldn't find them. 

A pleasant surprise, but can anyone explain why or how this happened?

[RikkFlohr]

If the relative paths are the same from the User Name level down, I think you have your answer. If not, well I would need to see some paths to say.

[pflower]

If the relative paths are the same from the User Name level down, I think you have your answer. If not, well I would need to see some paths to say.

They aren't since the external disk is simply an external disk with no Users.  Obviously this is not a problem but I was curious since a number of people have had problems with missing folders etc. and I seem to have completely circumvented that particular problem even though I was expecting it.

 One explanation might be that when I set up the Catalog on the Macbook Air I noted that importing folders did just that - it imported the folder in question but did not show its parent folder.  I had to ctrl-click on each folder to show its parent and get a proper hierarchy.  I never did this with the top level parent folder, so that folder does not show its path from the HD downwards.