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Author Topic: making it portable, is it possible?  (Read 913 times)

LarryL

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making it portable, is it possible?
« on: February 26, 2015, 11:58:10 pm »

I am beginning the painful process of ordering years of images in Lightroom. My objective is to sort my images primarily for use in presentations, for training and printing. I am not a professional photographer so I do not need to publish them except occasionally to Smugmug. 90% of my work is overseas and I travel a lot for work. I have thousands of images which I am culling but will still have a large library.
Currently I house all of my images on a desktop PC with appropriate backups. Most of the time when traveling I copy all the images I shoot to my laptop and then to my desktop when I get back.
What I would like to do is organize and keyword all my images in Lightroom on my desktop then copy everything (LIghtroom and images) to a portable hard drive which I could then connect to my laptop, open in Lightroom and still have all the metadata present. Is that possible?
« Last Edit: February 27, 2015, 05:22:52 pm by LarryL »
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Tony Jay

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Re: making it portible, is it possible?
« Reply #1 on: February 27, 2015, 12:09:54 am »

Hi Larry.
I do exactly what you are proposing.
Lightroom does not care where the catalog and image collection are as long as it can access them.
If the catalog and image collection are already on a single HDD use your back-up software to do a bit-for-bit copy to external HDD that you want to use (make sure that you only fill about half the space on the drive for maximum performance).

To open the catalog on a laptop, connect the external HDD to the laptop and then navigate to the external hard drive and go and find the .lrcat file and double click it - this will open open Lightroom using that catalog. It should know exactly where all the images since the external HDD is an exact mirror of the internal drive the copy was made from. Obviously this predicates that the Lightroom application is installed on the laptop.

Tony Jay
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LarryL

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Re: making it portable, is it possible?
« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2015, 05:21:54 pm »

Tony, I figured it would be something like that. If I understand you correctly I have to make an exact copy of the HD in my desktop on the portable HD, correct? What backup software do you use to achieve this?
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Tony Jay

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Re: making it portable, is it possible?
« Reply #3 on: February 27, 2015, 05:59:50 pm »

Any back-up software that will do a bit-for-bit back-up will do.
I use SnycBackPro but really there are a whole lot of options.

Tony Jay
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LarryL

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Re: making it portable, is it possible?
« Reply #4 on: February 27, 2015, 06:10:23 pm »

Thanks, Tony, greatly appreciated.
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Rory

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Re: making it portable, is it possible?
« Reply #5 on: February 27, 2015, 06:17:53 pm »

If you do not have backup software handy all you have to do is select all your files and export as a catalog to the portable HD. 
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Tony Jay

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Re: making it portable, is it possible?
« Reply #6 on: February 27, 2015, 06:56:16 pm »

If you do not have backup software handy all you have to do is select all your files and export as a catalog to the portable HD. 
Excellent thought!
Thinking out the box!

Tony Jay
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