Lightroom 3 ~ Move photos from one catalog to another, existing catalog? Not "export as new catalog"

Question

After consulting the interwebs and the Adobe site and a book about Lightroom 3, I remain confused about how to quickly and easily get photos from one existing catalog to a different catalog, since LR doesn't allow one (for its own arcane reasons, I assume) to have more than one catalog open at once.
Say I've got a Quick Collection of stuff I previously imported into "Catalog X" when it really belongs in "Catalog Y." What is the best way to get those photos into Catalog Y? Exporting this Quick Collection as a new catalog; closing down Catalog X; bringing up Catalog Y; running an import dialogue to import that Quick Collection... well, that seems pretty ridiculous. I assume I'm missing something obvious. Anyone know what the command is?
Also, if anyone can direct me to the Lightroom 3 discussions, as the search function here seems pretty rudimentary (e.g. put "lightroom 3" in the search box and it will bring up dozens of hits for "lightroom 4.3"), that'd be awesome... thanks...

Answer 1

etcetera23 wrote:
it's less confusing for me if i can just dump a whole folder full of stuff onto a drive and know that LR will look for it in that location, and not throw ?'s at me.
You can do exactly that. When the drive is plugged or on a network you have access to there will be no "?".
For offline drives "?" just do not mean anything other than plug it when you want them gone.
the lrcat could live on Dropbox or iCloud.
Yes, it could. But then I would not set Dropbox for continuous updates, as this might slow LR down. Just a triggered update once LR gets closed.
so - cornelia, when you travel, how do you handle bringing images to work on with you? for example, suppose you have 500 images you want to work on. LR believes that these images, along with many others, live in the folder BigHardDrive/prettypictures/Sep2012/ . are you working directly on those previews you mentioned, instead of looking at the originals while you're Developing, etc?
For Developing I need to have the image online, no way around that. Same for print and export. I have the images with me, preferably on my internal laptop drive, or on a USB-3.0-external disk (1-2 TB big).
For rating and other metadata adding the previews are sufficient.
When I travel on holidays to take new pictures I create a brand-new travel catalog on a small laptop and import every day the new shoot into it. I organize per day and import from all cameras into the same folder. I make a 2nd copy on a plugged USB-external drive, and I leave the camera storage card uncleared until the end of the journey. So I have 3 versions of the images.
In the evenings I have the new images completely available on the small laptop and develop them in the travel catalog. Usually I succeed only partially, as the quantity is too big, so I continue later on.
Back home I import the travel catalog into my master catalog on my big laptop, and the images onto its internal hard disk. I prefer this for speed during further development. The backup copies go on 2 different NAS drives, unnoticed by LR. Only then would I format my camera storage cards - 3 versions at any time is my motto.
Then the travel catalog has ended its life for me.
When I am done with my main editing I move the images from my internal hard disk to a 3rd NAS drive by dragging-dropping from within LR, into what I call my "LiveArchives": my master catalog will point to them 'forever'. The other 2 versions on the other NAS drives stay as they are, because I want them for being able to replenish my LiveArchives in case of failure. So LR does not know these safety-versions.
When I travel e.g. to my relatives to show images, I make sure that my master catalog has rendered all previews in the size and quality I want (standard previews 1680px high quality). Then I unplug my big laptop and go for the visit.
When I show the images, there are of course the "?", because I have no access to my NAS-drives.
I need to use the Survey-mode (N) with 1 image at a time in order not to see the black message "images is offline or missing", which would show in normal loupe view (E).
Or I show slideshows, which I have usually prepared as slideshow-collections before with rendered previews.
The biggest challenge for such slideshows is to decide how little to include to entertain your audience well - 400-600 images max, less is more.
Very nice about these visits is that I am able to quickly find almost any image my host might remember ("you know that funny face of cousin X, must have been at the birthday party of uncle Y, but I don't remember if it was Year 2003 or 2004 or possibly 2005?"). My success on this depends of course on my efforts of having added the relevant metadata. For this it is worth while to ask the others how they would search, what bits&pieces they remember - this gives you a valuable clue on how to keyword or what to put into titles/captions. Indispensable if you want to leave a legacy of images to the next generation.
If I had to close a catalog and open another one every now and then, I would not achieve that.
Same need, but very different requirements if you want to sell your images as stock.
thanks for all the suggestions. again, i am a lowly user indeed, and the professional who set me up on this, and taught me some methodologies for organizing, apparently didn't do the greatest job of it.
Well I would probably not consider him as a "professional"... but you also find on this forum some questions from poeple who claim to advise clients, where I think if they would only stop trying that...
I can just tell what works for me and why.
To advise others I need to understand their real needs - mostly there are several ways how to accomodate that - what will work for the poster is for him/her to decide after trial. Thinking in real needs rather than preconceived technical routes.
My own workflow has considerably evolved thanks to 3 years of reading on this forum.
Cornelia