Copying Lightroom Catalogue, (and a bit more)

Question

I am a newbie to Lightroom, and quickly realised that I needed a better PC to make the most of it.
I now want to copy Lightroom from my old WIn Vista laptop to Win 7 machine. I tried to extract the catalogue, but this came back, and said all the previews are missing.
My situation is this, all my RAW files are in one directory, and Lightroom is in another directory as I understand it, Lightroom does not touch the RAW files, but instead just has a 'list of changes' to make, so I imagine my problem was it could not find the RAW files, because they were not in the Lightroom folder.
On my new PC, I would like to rationalise things, as Lightroom will be my main tool for photo processing now. Can anyone give me some guidance on how to get the data of my laptop, and store it all in the Lightroom directory on my new PC?
Thanks in anticipation :-)
Steve

Answer 1

Welcome!
   Let's see.. first: copying your catalog is exteremely easy.  Just copy it like you would any other file.  It's happy that way.  No real reason to do export-to-catalog and import-from-catalog steps.
Your previews could not be found probably because you didn't copy them.  Unless you have some 50,000 images already in LR, I wouldn't bother.  Just tell LR to regenerate all of the previews when you are on your new machine.  I personally generate previews at 1:1 when doing imports.  Under library->previews-> render what you want.
There are a couple of things if you move your imags from one computer to the other:
If you copy your images into the exact same path as before, then LR will automatically find them, since the refernce is stored in the catalog.  If you put them somewhere else (for example, you didn't force-name your drive letter and it chose a different one) then LR will complain (put a ? mark in the listings) saying it can't find the image.  Just right-click in the library page, on the top level folder for your missing images and tell LR to find them again.  It will let you browse to the new location, and when you select it, will connect it back up with everything below it as well.  easy!
If you wish to "rationalize" things, then you can organize your images in quite a few different ways.  Almost everyone will have a different opion, you can count on that.  I import by date, and my format is    major_catagory->year->year_mon->year_mon_day->(images)     The "major_catagory" was added recently, so I could have things like portraits, nature, industrial, etc, all as seperate structures, but still allow searching across the entire database.  I didn't use to have it until I wanted an easier way to pull out just from one folder structure, etc.  Still not sure that's optimal for me, but it works for now.
   When I import images, they automatically go into the right folder structure, I just need to select the top level project.  Then when I do editing and such, I make collections to group them into whatever I need.  Don't forget keywords!  Unfortuantely right now, the import window always resets to "none", so you have to manually reset the keywords, etc, on import.  You can create a user defined set, but you still have to remember to select it.  Previous versions remembered what you did last... wish I could select that again!
Anyway, you'll find lots of opinions here.. use keywords, and collections.. those will help a lot.
Cheers!