How to move your Lightroom catalog from Windows to a Mac    [ Just Talk ]

Over the course of the week I've been moving all my data and other odds and ends off my old Windows PC and onto a new Macbook Pro and for the most part it's as simple as you would expect. The only times when things get a little more tricky is when you are trying to move application data that maintains paths to files on the system, such as Lightroom and iTunes do. Luckily in the case of Lightroom the move was fairly simple.

Note: Adobe says that the official way to move files from one computer to another is to use the export catalog feature, move the catalog over, then import. Well, that's nice, but 20K raw photos would take forever to export and I didn't want to mess with that if I could avoid it.

So, plan B was to simply move everything over to the Mac, open up Lightroom, and hope for the best. Here's what I did ...

1. Make sure that you have the same exact Lightroom version on both computers as there can be differences in the catalog between versions. I did this using 1.4.1.

2. Copy all your Lightroom data from Windows onto your Mac either via an external drive or if you want you can just do it over the network. In specific, you need to copy the Lightroom directory under your "My Pictures" folder which holds your catalog file, preview files, etc, plus you need your original image files. Hopefully you don't have your original photo files spread out all over the place because if you do then this will be more of a pain, so you might want to fix that first.

3. Simply remove the Lightroom folder on your Mac (assuming it's empty) and replace it with the one from you Windows PC. Since Lightroom uses the same exact catalog format on both OS' it won't have any problems reading the catalog off your Windows PC.

4. Now open up Lightroom on your Mac and you should see all of your images (with previews), your collections, metadata, etc. In the Library view you should see all the folders in the Folders dialog marked in red, which indicates that Lightroom can't find where those folders are on the system.

5. For each folder in the Folders dialog just right click and select "locate missing folder", then use the file navigator to point to wherever you copied that folder to on your Mac. Lightroom should then go through all the files that were in that folder and check that they are there. Once it's done that folder should be back to working as usual. Just repeat this for all your folders and you're done.

This process worked out great for me and it only took a few minutes to fix up Lightroom after I had copied everything over to my Mac. One thing that definitely helped the situation is that I had been letting Lightroom manage all my original photos and it was storing them in simple date based folders where the top level folder was the year the photo was taken. So I only had 4 folders for 2005-2008 which needed to be updated with their new location. If you use tons of different folders then this part would take you a bit longer.

Posted by agilliland at June 11, 2008 3:10 PM