brucewells Loc: Central Kentucky

Leigh, I know this is frustrating for you, but I believe you may be correct about finding someone to sit with you for a while. I'll recommend the book Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classroom in a Book. It is awesome to use when learning about Lightroom. It's available at Amazon and other places.

leighsimpson

brucewells thanks, and I shall get that book today. thanks again

SusanFromVermont Loc: Southwest corner of Vermont

As I said in my previous post, you do not want to create new catalogs unless they are specific to different groups of images. For most who are not professionals, one catalog is enough.

The reason you get the message about the file being missing is because the catalog you used to open LR does not know where that image is located. Using LR requires consistency. All organization or re-organization of images and the folders they are in MUST be done from within LR. If you move them around in your HD folder, then the connection between LR and those files is broken. And using an old catalog you discover that it does not know where to find your new images.

If you use the suggestions I made in my previous post, you will probably find your difficulties disappear!

When backing up the catalog, I send that backup to a specific location in a specific folder. Every month I create a new folder for that month only. That way if something happens and LR is not connecting with the photos for some reason, I can go into that folder and boot up LR with the NEWEST Catalog backup. You may find that the Catalog is in a zip folder, which requires extracting the content. That is how the catalog is stored so it takes up less space. And every month I also delete the oldest month's catalog!

DanCulleton

Keep the photos themselves on the external drive.
Locate your LR catalog on your startup drive on your desktop in a Drop Box (or similar) folder.
Install Drop Box on your laptop and access your LR catalogue there.
When importing, understand the difference between the Copy command (which creates a new copy of the file in a new location) and the Add command (which leaves the file in place but creates an index entry in the LR catalog which points the the original file).
If you like to edit on your laptop unencumbered by a connection to an external drive create Smart Previews (another term for small DNG FILES) on import and edit those. You then only need to connect to external drive if you need to export full size files.

Mundj Loc: Richmond TX

You might contact gene51, he is member of the Hog and offers Lightroom and Photoshop one on one trading using the internet.