Temporarily embed linked photos in catalog (collection)

Question

I use LR3 on two machines, my mac pro desktop and macbook pro laptop. I primarily use the laptop on shoots, to capture, annotate, etc., while the desktop in the studio is for serious editing because not only is it much faster, but it has lots of attached SATA drives. I have a master catalog which I sync between the machines via chronosync which works great. I can see all the photo previews on my laptop which is convenient and when I use the catalog on my desktop, I can do all that plus edit them. Anyway, what I'd love to be able to do is temporarily embed the master files in my catalog. Copy the catalog and previews to my laptop and continue editing them at home. Then when I copy the catalog back to my desktop, I'd like to move the embedded files back to their original locations, which are often scattered across different drives and folders. I know I LR3 let's me export a collection or catalog and all its associated files to a location of my choosing. But there is no way to put the files back where I'd ultimately like them to be stored without manually keeping track of the original file locations.

Answer 1

Peter Spier wrote:
OK, good point. And anchored images can't be on a different layer, so the problem becomes a lot more complex -- right up your alley.
Y-e-e-e-e-h well, maybe "no". You cannot move an inline image to another layer, so what one could do is to copy the image to the image layer instead and delete the image--but not its frame!--from the original position. There is a *huge* drawback, though, to this method: if the text reflows, the now-empty 'placeholder' frame will move along with the text but the copy containing the actual image will stay on its place. It kind of defeats the idea of having a single editable document for both purposes.
I suggest opening a copy of the document, then running this little Javascript:
var images = app.activeDocument.allGraphics;
for(var i=0;i<images.length;i++)
    images[i].remove();
which will remove all images without touching their frames. Export the document to PDF and then throw it away -- there is no good reason to save this copy somewhere, as you should always be working with the original file. Saving the emptied-out file somewhere will inevitably lead to confusion and errors.