I want to do some Lightroom housekeeping (keywording and rating) on my laptop while I am on an extended vacation, and want to make sure I'm on the right track.
I don't have enough room on the laptop drive to take along all the old images, but I believe I can use smart previews to save space. I also will be shooting and editing during that time, and I'd like to keep the new images on the laptop and back up to a portable drive, and this is where I get a little confused.
My Lightroom catalog resides on the desktop computer where I do my editing; my image files reside on another internal hard drive on that computer.
I am assuming the following will work to get the smart previews on the laptop:
Copy desktop catalog to laptop; map desktop HD to laptop with same drive letter so the laptop catalog knows where everything is.
Generate smart previews for everything in the catalog.
Mapped drive will be disconnected (obviously) on the road and LR will use the smart previews.
So, now I have smart previews I can use for tagging, etc. on the road. New images will be imported to the laptop HD using my normal folder structure (yyyy\yyyy-mm)and show up in the catalog.
When I get back home, I copy the catalog back to the desktop; the original images are where the catalog expects them to be, with updated metadata in the catalog. I copy the folders of new images to the desktop HD, LR will now show the images as missing in the catalog, so I point LR to their new location. Now I have my original images with the added keywords and ratings, plus the new images with whatever I did with them on the road all in my "original" catalog, correct?
Please let me know if I've got something wrong or there is a simpler way. Thanks!