Losing collections when I export/import as catalog???

I have 174k photos in my LR3 catalog and am finally getting to the point where I'm seeing serious slowdowns. For the past month or so I've been backing up and optimizing my catalog VERY regularly -- which helps at least temporarily -- but it's time for a better solution. I shoot a lot of road races (5k, half marathons, etc.) and I'd like to be able to archive old race photos to a separate catalog and then periodically move additional batches of photos there. After bouncing this off the folks at lightroomforums.net, here's what I ended up doing:
1. Backup and optimize main catalog.
2. Select photos from old races, making sure to have all filters turned off, so as to be able to grab ALL relevant photos with certainty.
3. "Export as Catalog..." and specify a name ("OldRaces") and location. I'm checking the first box ("Export selected photos only") in the dialog and leaving the other two unchecked, because I don't want to do anything with the photos/negatives themselves.
In the future, I'll want to be able to move more races from the Main catalog to the OldRaces catalog be exporting/importing as catalog, but for now I have a more pressing concern. When I followed the steps above, my Collection Sets appear in the OldRaces catalog I just created, but they don't contain any of the Collections they're supposed to, and therefore no photos. Here are a couple of screen captures to illustrate, looking at part of the photos from 2008...
The original "Main" catalog: http://grab.by/7ObA
Same thing in the new "OldRaces" catalog: http://grab.by/7Oby
Note that ALL photos from 2008 have been exported/imported as catalog, following the steps above, and should show up in their respective Collections. On the advice of LightroomQueen, I've since made a couple of changes, all to no avail:
- Using the 08DD Set as my test case, I removed "08DD-" from the name of each of the 3 Collections, so that the first few digits DON'T match the name of the Set.
- Same thing at the next level, renamed the "08" Set to "2008" so the name of a Set didn't match the first two characters of it's child Set.
- Updated from LR 3.2 to LR 3.3 (on a mac, btw).
After each of these changes, I've exported/imported as catalog. Sorry to say none of this did any good. The "2008" Set is nowhere to be found; the "08DD" Set now sits at the top level of my collections, alongside "08" and "09" and it contains no photos.
LightroomQueen also suggested right-clicking on a Set and choosing Export as Catalog, but that's not an option for me. I can do it with Collections (same miserable results) but not with Collection Sets. Similarly, I don't see this option when selecting multiple Collections and right-clicking.
From everything I've read, I'm doing precisely what I should do for the results I need, but something's clearly not working properly. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Dane

Update...
After updating to 3.3 and renaming all of my collections and collection sets so there are no instances of parents/children sharing the first few characters of their names, I started over. In the Main catalog, I selected all 25000 photos I've tagged with the keyword "archived" and exported them as a catalog named OldRaces. Perfect. OldRaces has two top-level collection sets: 2008 and 2009. Each of those sets contains several appropriate sets corresponding to specific races. Each race set contains the appropriate collections, and those collections contain the photos they should. Done, right? Nope.
I next switched back to the Main catalog to continue where I left off with the 2009 races. I selected another 6000-ish photos from the next couple of races and exported them to a new catalog called "Temp." I then switched to the OldRaces catalog and imported as catalog from Temp. I now have around 31000 photos in OldRaces, but none of them remember that they belong in collections.
Those 6000 photos represented three races, each in its own collection set under the umbrella of the 2009 set. After importing them to OldRaces, those three sets are at the top level of collections rather than falling under 2009. Not a big deal as I can move them easily enough, but the real problem is that those three sets are empty. Each set should contain several collections which hold the photos from that race, but they contain nothing at all.
Next step, I relaunched LR with the Temp set I had used as an export/import middle ground. (As an aside, why in the world do I even need to do this? Why doesn't LR's Export as Catalog command have the capability to designate a target catalog so I can export directly from Main to Old Races? It seems unnecessarily complicated to have to export to a temporary catalog only to turn around and re-import into the desired catalog. Another question for another day, I guess.) In the Temp catalog, the 2009 collection set is conspicuously absent but the three race-specific sets are there. More importantly, each contains the collections -- and, in turn, the photos -- that they should. So it looks as though exporting from the Main catalog is relatively glitch-free. The missing 2009 set bothers me but doesn't cause any real problem that I can see. The problem seems to be importing from the Temp catalog to the OldRaces catalog. Given that the 2009 set didn't survive the export to Temp, I can't expect it to miraculously reappear in OldRaces. So the import to OldRaces gives me the sets it should but not the contents (collections filled with photos) of those sets.
Does this shed any more light on the issue for the gurus out there?
Thanks!
Dane

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How to solve the error: "lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error" when trying to "import from catalog"?

I have around 400,000 photos of 15 years so given the high number, I organized all my photos into 6 catalogs to avoid potential problems. All the photos and the catalogs are in a 4TB Seagate external hard drive. I use Adobe Lightroom 5 and I use a PC with the latest Windows Office 2013.
I wanted to have a NEW Catalog of all my rated 1 Star+ photos of all the years in a single Catalog. So I created what I called Star+ Catalog and I was told the best option is to import a Catalog at a time and given that there is no means to filter importing only Stared photos, I would import all the photos and then delete all the UnStared photos. I did that for Catalog Year 2014 but at the end gave me the message: "lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error". It actually had imported around 40k photos from about 50k total. I tried again and again and every time I end up with the same thing. I created another new Catalog and stared from scratch and the same ting happened: the ONLY EXACT 40k or so photos were imported and the rest were not!! When I imported Catalog Year 2013 of around 45k photos, it worked perfectly. But when I imported Catalog Year 2012 of 35k photos, the same thing happened!!
Any advice: 1) on how to solve this? and 2) if there is a better and easier way to create this Master Catalog of All Stared Photos of All my Catalogs?

OK, my starting point is that LR can happily contain 400000+ photos, and it's a mistake to create a 1 star plus catalogue as you suggest. Instead, I'd recommend you create a master catalogue of all your photos, which you can then query however you want - 2 star, or a certain keyword, or with "xyz" in the title etc.
If you are intent on going that way, you could try a slight change from what you've done so far. Instead of trying to import an entire catalogue and then delete no-star pictures, take the 2014 and 2012 catalogues and select only the 1 star photos. Then do an Export as Catalog for these items, and import the 2014-1star and 2012-1star into your new catalogue. That may get you past the problem images which I suspect are the problem.
If that doesn't work, or if you follow my initial advice, you're going to need to identify the image where the failure occurs. You may have a corrupt image file, and replacing it from your backup may be sufficient to resolve the problem. Alternatively, it may be a corrupt record in the catalogue, and in this case it may be sufficient to remove the image from the catalogue and import it again. You might try selecting everything in the 2014 catalogue and seeing if you can do an Export as Catalog, creating a clean 2014, and deleting 2014's previews folder might also get rid of a potential problem. Something else is to try the Export as Catalog for images 1-40000, then a second Export as Catalog for images 40002-50k.
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John

Why do my photos duplicate in a Collection when I export them

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Seán McCormack wrote:
I suspect it's the latter option in Beat's list: Add to Catalog was ticked when you exported.
That was also my first suspicion, but then, by doing so:
The catalog should show a JPG right next to a RAW, not 2 RAW images of the same original
The images in the catalog should point to different folders, one (the RAW) to the original, the other one (the JPG) to the export folder, in this case the new folder on the desktop.
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Switzerland

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1) Is this fixable? I'm torn between whether to call this a bug or not.The attribute in a "subscribing entity" that indicates that it is subsribed to a master version of the entity is called the reference ID. This is the physical (numeric) ID of an entity in another application in the same workspace. So for template T in application A that is subsribed to template T in application B with reference ID 555, the only indication that the subscription exists is that the reference ID for template T in application A is set to 555. The purpose of the reference ID is so that in a development environment if the developer of application A decides to refresh the template from the master the operation knows where to get the master copy from -- by using ID 555. It does not know that it should go to application B and look for template T. Similarly, if the developer of application B decides to publish template T to any/all subscribers, the operation simply copies the template to all applications in the workspace having templates with reference ID=555.
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2) Am I making a big deal over nothing? Practically speaking, I will be making changes to the templates/themes in the development workspace and then re-importing them from development into production, so should I even care that the production applications are not subscribed to the common application in production?
Publish/subscribe mechanisms are for the development environment.
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LR3: Import from catalog over a network?

Just upgraded to LR3 on two networked Macs. LR2 catalogs have been upgraded to LR3 format by launching LR3. Both catalogs seem to work properly with their local application. When I try "Import from Catalog" from Mac1 to Mac2 over the network, I get this error message: "Lightroom can not import from this catalog. The catalog does not appear to be a valid Lightroom catalog." However, catalog import appears to work properly with the reverse case: importing from Mac1 to Mac2.
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Hi Bert,
Thanks for the reply. No, permissions on both ends were fine. For some reason, rebooting both Macs allows importing now. No change to the catalogs (or permissions) between working and not working - just a reboot.
Strange...
John

I keep getting the error: "lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error" when trying to import from a catalog?

I have around 400,000 photos of 15 years so given the high number, I organized all my photos into 6 catalogs to avoid potential problems. All the photos and the catalogs are in a 4TB Seagate external hard drive. I use Adobe Lightroom 5 and I use a PC with the latest Windows Office 2013.
I wanted to have a NEW Catalog of all my rated 1 Star+ photos of all the years in a single Catalog. So I created what I called Star+ Catalog and I was told the best option is to import a Catalog at a time and given that there is no means to filter importing only Stared photos, I would import all the photos and then delete all the UnStared photos. I did that for Catalog Year 2014 but at the end gave me the message: "lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error". It actually had imported around 40k photos from about 50k total. I tried again and again and every time I end up with the same thing. I created another new Catalog and stared from scratch and the same ting happened: the ONLY EXACT 40k or so photos were imported and the rest were not!! When I imported Catalog Year 2013 of around 45k photos, it worked perfectly. But when I imported Catalog Year 2012 of 35k photos, the same thing happened!!
I then tried exporting the needed photos to a new Catalog and that worked. But then when I try to import them again from my Master *+ Catalog I get the same error again!!
I also tried creating a new Master *+ Catalog and tried to import the Catalogs of each year into it and the same error happened again!!!
Any advice: 1) on how to solve this? and 2) if there is a better and easier way to create this Master Catalog of All Stared Photos of All my Catalogs?

This is a duplicate thread - see here

Problems with "import from catalog" & "collection type mismatch"

I'm attempting to keep 2 catalogs on 2 different computers sunchronized. I'm exporting photos
and collections (actually a web gallery) from one computer to another, and
I'm getting a "collection type mismatch" error, that prevents the photos from being a
dded to the collection. I've exported and imported the flash gallery template
from one system to the other to make sure the templates were identical. A
ll the photos, keywords, and attributes seem to be imported properly, but the photos aren't added
to the collection. Anyone having success exporting/importing collections between computers?
I'm using LR 2.7 on Win 7 & Vista.
Thanks,
Mark

Thanks Dorin. I tested it with a "regular" collection, and it works.
I hope they fix this in v. 3 too!

Correct procedure to export/import catalog

I took photos on my vacation and imported them into Lightroom 4 on my laptop. The RAW files are separated by Date folders. I have edited many of them and saved the resulting jpgs in a separate folder called jpg exports, as a subfolder in each date folder.
I have selected each of the date folders and the jpg export folders and selected "Export as a Catalog"
From that window, I have selected my external drive, created a file name Caribbean, deselected "Export Selected Photos only" as I want all of the photos I selected.
Export Negative files and Include Available Previews is selected.
The Catalog Export starts.
That process is underway as I type.
When I did this process in the past, my next step was to plug my external into my desktop, launch Lightroom 4 and import the catalog off of the external drive. When I did this before, the RAW files by date showed up in Lightroom, but each of the jpg folder didn't transfer.
What am I doing wrong or is it not possible to transfer the jpg edits over as part of the catalog?

"Import from Catalog" will only pay attention to images which are directly represented in the Catalog you have selected - which show a thumbnail there.
The fact that your JPG exports may be physically located inside the same folders as the Raw files that you have imported, or elsewhere, has no relevance here. If when you exported these JPGs, you selected the "import to Catalog" option then they will be represented in the Catalog and will therefore be included... but unless you actively want to see these exports next to the raw based images, in LR, with all the potential for confusion that brings - I am not going to suggest that as a good idea.
It is not necessary to first "Export as Catalog". You can directly put the Catalog you have already made, or a copy of that, onto the external drive. Also you can directly move (probably, Copy is safer) all the image folders bodily onto this external drive. These things can be done in your standard file browser (Finder / Explorer), when Lightroom is not running on the laptop.
Then you can connect your external drive to the Desktop, and start your main LR Catalog there. You can "import from catalog" (merge) all the images thumbnails, with their settings and metadata etc, into the desktop's LR catalog. All the images that you saw in the laptop, will now appear in the desktop too. If you only imported the Raws before, that is all you will see now.
The physical addressing information for each Raw file, as when originally imported, will also be transferred along with the other metadata.
So at this point the image thumbnails you have merged into your desktop catalog appear "offline" - the stored addressing they have, currently does not work in its new context. There will be a whole tree of date-based folders listed, corresponding to how things looked within the laptop, but at the moment showing "not found" so far as the desktop is concerned. This is OK - easily fixable.
You next need to decide where you want these image folders from the trip, to be located long-term. Transfer them bodily into that location (using Finder / Explorer). This should (in one go) include all the Raw files and the prior JPG exports, keeping the relative arrangement and naming of all these folders and subfolders intact.
Then in the Folders list of your desktop Catalog, you can right-click on the highest-level folder which is currently marked as "not found" with a ? icon. Then re-browse that to the new location where you have just put the transferred image folders. LR can then in one operation, not only update the file location information it holds for that folder, but also for all known contents of that folder - which means, all the imported images inside, and their containing subfolder "tree" - the whole trip. This will make all the transferred images from that trip "wake up again", and no longer be offline. You can now carry on editing them just as you did on the laptop.
If you have used a structured date-folder arrangement (such as, one of the automatic ones LR provides) in a 100% consistent manner when working on the desktop and when working on the laptop, your images from the trip can merge seamlessly into your main library.

Losing resolution when exporting...

I have made a few movies using photos and video clips set to music. When I export them, either using Quicktime or sharing them with iDVD, they lose a lot of resolution. Is there a way to burn these movies to DVD without losing quality?

I used the Ken Burns feature on every photo (70 total). Some of the photos are 3264x2448(8MP), most are 2592x1944(5MP), and a few are scanned photos size app. 2711x2033.
Okay. Would assume the still are being stored in your project as 1920x1440 frames. (You can check this out for yourself and I don't know if working in PAL mode would be different that NTSC.) In any case, the stored image resolution will be the limiting factor for export resolution.
When finished, I exported the video in Large size 720x576. At this resolution the quality was very deteriorated.
Just finished making a dozen runs duplicating your work flow in Compressor Native PAL, Compressor Native NTSC, 768x576, 640x480, etc. and cannot duplicate you problem without doing something like using a filter to overdrive the contrast like this:
Preview in iMovie '08
Output in QT Player
Output w/Overdriven Contrast in QT Player
Apple Care recommended that I share with iDVD, but I got the same results. Then I started experimenting with Quicktime, which is where I am now. I have tried several different sizes, including my own concoctions with the custom function (1382x1036 is what I'm exporting at now, I want to keep a 4:3 aspect ratio).
As indicated above, you can open your project folder and check the "Still Images" QT file which contains your stored photos to see their resolution. Max resolution depends on your project import settings (e.g., 1920x1080, 960x540, etc.) and their orientation. In any case, this is the max height resolution to which you can export your project at optimum quality for its aspect ratio. Remember, however, that whatever resolution you export your project to will later be re-scaled in iDVD down to 720x576 (PAL) or 720x480 (NTSC) for burning to DVD. If you think the increased processing time is worth whatever increase in quality you may achieve, then go for it.
The resolution looks acceptable (once I shrink the movie down to fit on the screen), but as I mentioned the color saturation is too high. In the quicktime filters, I adjusted the saturation down to 80 percent, and reduced the red by 5. Still waiting on the results...
Still haven't a clue here.

LR4 Export - Import Catalogs

When I export a catalog, what naming convention and folder structure do I export -to-?
That is, I have a My Documents\Picture Folder\05_MillerPhotography\20120930_MarlboroughSoccer (containing the images) hard drive-Lightroom4 folder structure and I want to export the Marlborough shoot to a temp folder and then import it (in the exact same structure) to a different catalog that does have the My Documents\Picture Folder\05_MillerPhotography\ structure, but not yet includes a folder for Marlborough.
It seems that when I do the import, it sends my new folder way down past 05_MillerPhotography\, such as repeating the entire structure -starting at- my 05_MillerPhotography folder in the new location.
I can be exporting from a Catalog on an external drive or different desktop drive, or particularly my laptop to my desktop.
Thanks.

I assume you ment Export-SPWeb not Export-SPSite command.
There is no known limitations in file size, except the compression file size that is set to 24MB by default. If you exceed 24MB, the cmp file will be splitted into several files. You can change the default 24MB value up to 1024MB, using the -compressionsize
parameter.

How to keep a custom file order when exporting a preview cataloge?

I export my LR catalog as a preview catalog for my editor. He edits the photos, plus, he re-arranges the ORDER (sequence) of the photos for me.
When he exports it as a catalog and sends it back to me, the sequence is lost because I am guessing that the file order sequence will show only on his computer.
Given he cannot rename the files because that will lose the link/connection on import on my end, is there a way he can save the catalog so that the custom sequence stays the same on my end?

Klaus,
I wouldn't know that Microsoft provides access to the controls that Explorer and file dialog consist of.
There might be a different and more powerful solution though. The
WINDOWS Explorer / file dialog have a plugin API that allows you to
associate your own application for thumbnail creation with a particular
file extension. That way, TDMS thumbnails will show in any instance of
Explorer and
File Dialog without you having to make your own dialog. Basically, you
would need to compile the VI that creates the thumbnail into a
LabVIEW-built DLL and then wrap this DLL with some C++ boilerplate code
that Microsoft provides. You might want to have a look at the bottom of
this article to get an idea of how the whole thing works:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/0600/w2kui2/default.aspx.
Hope that helps,
Herbert

Losing collections when I export/import as catalog???

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