lsimpkins Loc: SE Pennsylvania

While many others have replied with detailed information on what will or will not be able to be moved from LR to another piece of software, one important point seems to have been overlooked.

Your photos are never "in" the LR catalog. The catalog tells LR where to find the individual photos on your computer as well as storing any develop settings, metadata, etc. As such, you decide where to store the image files and in what directory or folder structure. Think of the LR catalog much the same as the catalog in a public library. The catalog contains lots of information about an individual book, including where to find it, but it does not contain the book itself.

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Question for you. Does the LR database record the edits that you do with other software? I suspect that is doesn’t but I thought I’d ask.

redlegfrog

Thanks,
This means that if I try one program and then try another I will lose the time and effort for the work of those images but the image is still free to use in another program. Correct?

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

That would depend. Is software #1 non destructive? Do you have an original unaltered copy available for use in software #2?

redlegfrog

Was shooting slides really so bad?

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

For the RAW files, Lightroom Classic will read the sidecar XMP files during "Import" if the "other software" creates them.

For JPEGS, Lightroom will "import" them as they remain after "other software" has altered them.

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Your edits with the other program will be stored wherever you told that program to put them. LR will not have their location in its own catalogue/database.

tcthome Loc: NJ

I agree. After reading Scott Kelby's book Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC book about organizing an already collection of photos before importing them into LR, you would know exactly where your photos live on your storage device. Be it internal or external to your computer. Lightroom only shows you where the photos are. They will still be in the same place if you do not use Lightroom in the future. You could always save the final edits as jpegs or as tiff files if you think you might want to do some more editing to them in the future without using LR. It is always a good idea to save a copy of the original (before any edits) to a separate external drive if the photos are important enough to you. It would be nice if in LR you could click SAVE AS,( eg. , jpeg, tiff, etc.) instead of having to use the Export dialog.

tcthome Loc: NJ

From LR6, I use Affinity photo & sometimes the Topaz products to do some editing. They come back into LR as tiff files. I'm no expert but believe tiff files can be read/used by most or all software programs, including Windows & Mac/Apple. Is there any type of post processing/adjustments that you need to do that the software program that came with your camera doesn't do?

Poppirazzi Loc: Los Angeles, CA

Photoshop Elements has the Organizer which has been around longer than Lr's catalog capability. You can get a 30 day free trial here: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements/download-trial/try.html

I have been using it since version 3 and it is now on version 19 (Photoshop Elements 2021).

To answer your specific questions about switching between different database programs, there is no standardization of how various programs treat the metadata in a file. So, some of the metadata such as keyword tags, star ratings and other information that a database program uses to sort through a catalog, may or may not be visible or usable from one program to another. This is true no matter how the metadata is saved within the program and no matter how the catalog information is exported or transferred from one database to another.

FWIW, Lightroom can import a catalog from Elements and I believe most but not all of the database information is preserved. However, Elements cannot import a catalog from Lightroom.

redlegfrog

Thanks for the info.
Now I can rest easy and proceed with my plan to try some different programs. Wish me luck!