backroader wrote:
This is great advice I wish I had thought of before jumping into Lightroom head first. Thank you! I will think about it with every import from now on. In the meantime, I think I am stuck with sorting out the problems I have created for myself one at a time!
The default in Lightroom is to save the recipe for what you have done to an image in its database. What you can do is to save it with the file, some file formats will allow you to share it internally to the file others it will create an xmp file.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/tag/xmp-sidecar-filesonce you have done this you should find xmp files alongside your files.
Now you can start a new catalogue/ database make sure you save it to where you want it to live. This catalogue will be empty so now you will want to test it so import a single folder from your existing lightroom organised folders. make sure you copy rather than move so that you can open the old catalogue file and be able to use this if you have problems.
When you import you may want to add keywords such as location event.
you can add these later if you want.
Hopefully if everything has gone well, your photographs should have transfered with the adjustments you have made in the previous catalogue/database.
If all goes well you can continue importing a folder at a time or perhaps at a higher level e.g you might have photos in \2015-10-12\ which has a parent directory of \2015\ so you can select 2015 and include subdirectories and build your collection in the new location and keep the existing adjustments.
Once you are confident you can copy all your photo's to the new structure with the new database pretty much automatically. If you have used a different folder structure say you put cars in a folder called cars you can add cars as a keyword. lightroom will by default place pictures in folders named after the date they were taken. so your cars folder may end up split over several folders, rather than one.
However this is fine because you can select photographs by the keyword cars and it will give you a view which is just photographs with the keyword cars, you can combine keywords say you have fords you can select cars and fords to just display fords. You may prefer to create hierarchal keywords since a ford is a kind of car so you can select cars narrow it down to fords maybe narrow down to pinto.
Because you can tag a photo with several tags. lets say you have tagged some images of uncle frank you can select cars and uncle frank to show just pictures of cars and uncle frank or maybe just uncle frank with a pinto you can select pinto and uncle frank.
Any way take it slowly until you know things are going to plan. If things foul up choose your original catalogue file and your back to where you were with a second copy of some of your images else where.
do not try to put the new catalogue within the old catalogue, its liable to make a total mess of things.