Lightroom catalog/preview multiple folder merging

I have had Lightroom since version 2, have upgraded all along and now have Version 4.2. I noticed as I ugradeed to Version 3, the catalog was still named Lightroom 2 catalog-2. Somehow, along the way, this is now Lightroom 2 Catalog -2-2. This is the catalog Lightroom defaults to. With Lightroom 4 I decided to rename these to: Mark's Lightroom 4 catalog and Mark's Lightroom 4 previews. Well, all I suceeded in doing is I now have 5 folders.
Lightroom 2 Catalog-2Previews.lrdata with 21.1GB
Lightroom 2 Catalog-2-2 Previews.lrdata with 1.6GB
Lightroom settings with169KB
Mark's Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat with 34.6GB
Mark's Lightroom 4 Previews.lrdata with 4.78GB
I also have these two folders with the square Lightroom icon:
Lightroom 2 Catalog-2.lrcat 1GB
Lightroom 2 Catalog-2-2.lrcat 1.01GB
There is also the Backup folder and tempary import and temporary import journal folders within the Lightroom folder.
Windows 7 Ultimate, i7 quad core, new SSD c drive and new 3T Barracuda d drive.
I do back up my d drive on an external hard drive and have put this Lightroom folder on a separate hard drive.
Now, how do I merge those 5 folders into one l catalog and 1 previews folders with messing up.
I have searched the website and watched Julianne Kost's video on merging but am needing a little more specific guidance to not mess this up!
Thanks for any help you can give.

It seems to me that you do not see the file endings since you say "I presume these are catalogs".
The catalog is a file, not a folder, and - on Windows - does not have a yellow folder icon - although it can be (and usually is) within a folder. Open the folder - what do you see then?
The previews on the other hand are in a folder.
If you don't see the file endings go >My Computer >the drive where the catalog is on, select >Tools >Folder Options >View tab.
Make sure that the box that reads "Hide extensions for known file types" is not checked. If it is checked you won't see the file ending < .lrcat> because it will be hidden.
BTW that's on Windows but there must be something similar on Mac.
RE: Previews folders: You just merge the catalogs. You don't have to do anything with the previews.
I would suggest that you merge all of the catalogs you can find.You might have created the 1 GB catalogs inadvertyently.
You could check though by going >File >Catalog, then navigate to the 1 GB catalog and click on it. Lr will open with it (afterclosing down the present catalog) and you'll see what it contains.
If Lr cannot open it then there's not much you can do about. The catalog might be corrupt.
Here's the address for Lr Help that shows you all the options available in <Import from Another Catalog:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/lightroom/using/WS9616DD60-0C3A-484b-8413-053347F21456.html

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Very Large Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata File

My Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata file is very large, about 12GB; Is this because of my preview settings? I only have about 10,000 photos in my Lightroom catalog and I'm concerned as to how large this file will get as my catalog grows.

I have 129,980 in my lightroom catalog. The photos go back to January 2000 and are only about 350GB but this previews file is over 116GB. This seems excessive.
Is the alternative to simply take a moment to build previews when I go to a folder? Most of my folders are pretty small.

Backing up lightroom catalog - preview folder?

If the preview folder is not backed up, what effect does this have on lightroom? I am thinking only main effect would be those images that are no longer connected, you will lose their thumbnails/previews. Am I right in my thinking? For backup routines, do you usually include the preview subfolder?

The LR backup does not include backing up previews, it backs up the catalog file itself. These can be regenerated at any time, so backing them up isn't necessary, and if backup outside of LR I am not sure how you would re link them anyway so perhaps would be pointless.

Lightroom catalog previews dissapeared!

Hello, about a week ago i got some problems with my pc, and decided to use some clean-up applications. I fear these might have deleted some of my lightroom files.
What is happening is, that whenever I go into lightroom, it shows the photo names, folders and correct number of photos. But there are no images what so ever. I've then tried re-installing lightroom with success but only to discover that when i restart my computer or try running an update, it goes back to bad... Oh yeah, about the updates as well, adobe updater doesn't seem to work, it just won't install my updates.

> It says "no photo" in the big box
Then it's not the previews that have disappeared, but the actual photos. Looks your clean-up application was in a mood for cleaning up.
Check if you can find your actual files on your drive or in the trash box. If not, use some undelete software and avoid too much disk activity on your photo drive until then.

Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata?

I am running into space problems on my C drive (hard to imagine, but I my computer was configured before LR and iTunes). I have moved the iTunes music to another drive, but still need to free up space. LR is using over 3GB in the following location:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata
Under it are folders 0 through 9 and A through F (plus a file called thumbnail-cache.db). These in turn have their own subfolders. Can I remove the whole C:\Documents and Settings\DandJ\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata structure? Do I need to change a preference to have this preview stuff go to a different drive in the future? My 'Camera Raw Cache Settings' is now pointing to a different drive, but this doesn't seem to be the same thing.
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Thanks.

You can move your Lightroom catalogue and the previews to a different drive. The previews always must be in the same folder that the catalogue lives in. After you move them, simply double-click on the moved catalogue file to open it, and away you go.
Hal

Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews

I am running LR3.3.
I am doing some housecleaning, and I've found this folder: C:\Documents and Settings\My Name\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata\
It looks like something that was abandoned during an upgrade, and thus it's a candidate for the trash bin. Any thoughts?

Lr 3 creates a copy of the original when you upgraded from an earlier version (i.e Lr1 or Lr2 to Lr3). Therefore, if you can locate a copy for Lr3 then yes it is redundant and can be deleted. The new file may not be labelled Lr3 but the date stamp should still give you a clue as to which is the most recent. That being said, a new copy will be created upon relaunch should you delete the wrong version. Basically, trashing the lrdata file simply means that Lr will need to rebuild a new copy.

Whatever happened to previews.db in Lightroom 5 Catalog Previews.lrdata?

In earlier versions of Lightroom, there used to be a file called previews.db inside a directory called "Lightroom 5 Catalog Previews.lrdata" , but in Lightroom 5.7, I see that "Lightroom 5 Catalog Previews.lrdata" has become a file (no longer a directory) and there is no previews.db. I had a plugin that needed to read previews.db in order to generate thumbnails. Now I don't know what to do. (Rob Cole, you wrote the function that did this, and it worked great while there was a previews.db -- perhaps you know what is up.) If anyone can point me to where a file similar to previews.db can be found (it has to be parseable by sqlite), that would be very helpful. Thanks!

I don't use a Mac, so cannot answer definitively, but perhaps this folder was compressed either via selecting some option on the folder, itself, or by running some maintenance function that automatically compressed folders that were deemed as wasting space. I would think you'd want this to be an compressed folder so as not to use up an inorfinate amount of time to work with the previews contained inside. Can you make an uncompressed copy and then rename the compressed original as something else and rename the copy to the correct folder name?
Here is some info on compressed folders on Macs I found by Googling:
OS X Mavericks: Compress and uncompress files and folders

LR3 - Merging Individual Lightroom Catalogs into a "Master" Catalog | The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost | Adobe TV

In this Episode of The Complete Picture Julieanne demonstrates how to combine individual Lightroom catalogs into a single, “Master” Lightroom catalog to simplify a photographers workflow and enable multi-shoot searching.
http://adobe.ly/ytQLSL

What if I'm one of those disorganized folks who made the mistake of having the same images in multiple catalogs, some with and some without edits? How would I fix that mess?

How do I separate the Catalog and the Previews.lrdata folder?

I have my catalog stored on a data drive that is backed up regularly. The Previews.lrdata folder is now located alongside with the Catalog.lrcat file. But since the Previews.lrcat folder is automatically generated and only contains previews of the photos, I don't want to backup this huge folder. I would like to store my preview.lrdata on a fast harddisk that I don't need to backup, and leave my catalog on my data drive.
Does anyone know the trick how to do this?
Thanks in advance for any help.

Hans,
I also wish one could specify the location where to store the previews on a catalog basis (as it is on a global basis for the ACR cache). I save my drives on a regular basis with an older version of Norton Ghost, which I'm very happy with. But, I cannot exclude files/folders from backups, so I'm stuck saving the previews regularely as well.
Beat Gossweiler
Switzerland

How does installation of CC Photoshop and Lightroom affect my current catalogs, previews, and caches?

I am going to subscribe to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan. How can I preserve (import?) and use my current catalogs, previews, and caches from my current installation of Lightroom? Or will I have to start over once the new version of Lightroom CC is installed?

If you are currently using Lightroom 5 then switching over to the creative cloud is really simple. There are some who say that it isn't necessary to switch to Lightroom downloaded from the creative cloud. But I did. I'm using Windows, so I used the standard uninstall process to uninstall my standalone Lightroom. Then I installed Lightroom from the creative cloud. After the installation was complete there was an icon for Lightroom (just like the previous one because it is the same program) on my desktop. I double clicked on the icon and Lightroom opened the same catalog that I had been using and everything that I had done previously was still in place. You see, the catalog and previews and all those other files are user files generated by Lightroom on your computer. But they aren't part of the Lightroom program. So removing the Lightroom program does nothing to your catalog or previews or preview cache. It's the same program precisely. It's just licensed differently.
If you have been using Lightroom 4 then Lightroom 5 will find the catalog you have been using and will prompt you to allow it to create an updated copy of it that conforms to the new database format. It's no different than upgrading the standalone version. So the short answer is that you shouldn't lose any of your work by switching over.

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thanks
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See this section of the Help: Lightroom Help | Import photos from other catalogs

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Thank you for your reply. Very simple and helpful!
However, I am now a bit lost as my catalog is messed up. I am missing folders in the catalog that I have open. When I helped LR find them on my hard drive, I got a popup question that read, "The selected folder or one of its subfolders is already in Lightroom. Do you want to combine these folders. I clicked "Merge" and then the folder completely disappeared from the list of folders. I still see it in the correct place on my hard drive, but I can't get to it from LR now. I assume those missing folders (and another folder full of pics I imported but now don't see listed in the catalog) are in another catalog as I think I have been working with the backup catalog that I opened at the beginning of this whole mess. Can you help me get everything current and in one catalog again? Thank you.

Lightroom catalog in Creative Cloud

Does anyone have experience with putting a Lightroom catalog in the Creative Cloud folder to use for multiple computers? It seems like it should work well for photographers who are on the road a lot and would like to avoid merging catalogs after each trip.

well it does not even work in a local network....
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Catalog Preview copy folders?

All,
Quick question. I have two folders in the Lightroom subfolder of the Pictures folder on my Macbook Pro. They are:
Lightroom 3 Catalog Previews.copy.1680lrdata
Lightroom 3 Catalog Previews.copy.1440lrdata
as well as the standard Lightroom 3 Catalog Previews.lrdata
Are those two copy files needed? Not sure how I might have created them. Thanks.
Jay S.

Ian Lyons wrote:
The folders are 100% not of Lr's making. On Mac platform Lr creates a package (lrdata) containing 2 files and 16 top levels folders (1,2,3,.....D,E,F). Each of these folders will contain multiple folder, and within these you will find the actual preview pyramid file for each image. If the image has a VC associated with it will be located beside the master. Each pyramid preview for a real file or VC contains multiple JPEG previews of various sizes (1024, 1400, 1680, 2048...). You need a special application to open the preview file as it is not a conventional JPEG (i.e. drop the preview file onto an app called File Juicer and it will extract all of the embedded previews).
http://echoone.com/filejuicer/
Ian,
Thanks for the link.. I'll look it up.. O.K., so the gaunlet is down. LOL .. I'm positive I didn't create those.. Again, when I was switching within the LR prefernces to different sizes for testing performance on rendering (1440 or 1680) that was the only place I was doing something. If not out of LR, I'm not sure where. It's odd that the two folder mirror the two sizes (by name) I was playing around with. I'm not at my Mac now so I can't test anything. They almost seem like programmed names though.
Again thanks for the filejuicer link.
Jay S.

Can I move the Lightroom Catalog from one location to another?

Lightroom by default, places the Lightroom Catalog in the Pictures folder on my PC. My image library though, is located on an external hard drive. I've read that it is better to have the Catalog at the same location to avoid disconnected images, which sounds reasonable. Is it feasable to move the Catalog over to the same drive as my image library, or will that cause a problem? In other words would I need to start over again and create a new Catalog on the external drive? I know this sounds like a dumb question, but I've learnt to my cost that the obvious solution isn't necessary the correct one.

For better performance it is preferable to have the catalog located on an internal hard drive. By default the catalog and the preview files have to be located in the same folder since there is continual read/write taking place while working in Lightroom. Lightroom does not make any changes to the original files so its fine for them to be located on another hard drive internal or external. Lightroom loves lots of hard disk space to operate so if your catalog is on an internal drive make sure it not starved for disk space.
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Your photo files can reside on a HDD conected to a network but your catalog and preview files cannot be located on a network.
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Lightroom catalog/preview multiple folder merging

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