Merge Collections OR Export Book. Please Help

[Jay212NYC]

I recently designed a book in Lightroom 4 and due to a bug that I have heard others have also fallen victim to, the layout has somehow been lost or corrupted. Luckily I have a time machine backup from several weeks ago that has a version of the LR4 catalog that contains the working layout.

My problem is that in the several weeks between the backup catalog and the current catalog, I have created numerous collections of photos. I can't simply export the new collections as a catalog and then re-import them in the old catalog with the working book layout because the photos aren't NEW. They are simply new collections. The FILES already exist in the old catalog, the collections are simply new but are from numerous separate folders.

Is there a way to export or merge the new collections into the backup catalog containing the book layout? Even if I could somehow tag the images in the collections with a specific keyword and then somehow import the keywords or updated metadata into the old catalog, then I could isolate them and manually create a new collection.

Any ideas?
Greatly appreciated.

[john beardsworth]

Shift select all the collections, then select all the resulting images in the grid. Do a file > export as catalog (no previews or negatives) and open this temporary catalogue. Review it and delete any collections which you don't want. Then open the backup catalogue and do a File > Import from Another Catalog.

[Jay212NYC]

The import from another catalog doesn't seem to work, because the files already exist in the backup catalog. It's only new COLLECTIONS made with existing photos that I want to restore... The dialog box seems to indicate that the photos already exist and therefor won't import.

Am I missing something?

[john beardsworth]

Why not try this. In the backup catalogue, select the book layout and right click it. Export as Catalog. Then import this into the new one.

[Jay212NYC]

... that won't work either because the book layout contains photos that are already present in the other catalog. No new FILES have been imported in the newer catalog, only collections created.

[john beardsworth]

Have you tried it? Usually the files in the other "receiving" catalogue are updated. I think there's a timestamp, so maybe in the backup catalogue you could apply a dummy keyword to those files.