You traveled with a laptop and used Lightroom on this laptop to import and work on your photos while you were on the road. Now you’re back home and you’re wondering how to get the photos along with your work (flags, stars, keywords, editing, etc) into your main Lightroom catalog on your desktop computer.
In this video tutorial from my Lightroom CC/6 and 5: The Fundamentals & Beyond video series I show you how to transfer your Lightroom work and your photos. (2020 Update: two newer versions of my Lightroom Fundamentals & Beyond video series have been released since this article was written – click here to go to the latest! (The video below is still applicable to later versions of Lightroom Classic.)
(For best quality, after clicking on Play, click on the sprocket wheel in the bottom right and choose HD. Quality is better in the actual Lightroom Fundamentals & Beyond videos.)
Note that this technique isn’t the one to use if you have purchased a new computer and want to get everything transferred over from your old one – read instead Victoria Bampton’s article on moving to a new computer. It’s also not the best technique if you regularly use two computers and don’t mind carrying an external drive – in this case, put your catalog and your photos on the external drive. (Here’s an article on this approach, but it’s covered more in depth in my Lightroom CC/6 and 5: The Fundamentals & Beyond video series.)
Great Thanks for the tip Laura! very usefil information! I just changed computers and this comes very handy!
Regards
Recently started using Lightroom Classic. I have a travel lap top and just moved all the photo files from a recent vacation to my PC at home…worked perfectly! I had been fretting this and it was so nice to have the process work so smoothly! Thank you!
I’m happy to hear it, Annie!
Thank you for a very simple and straight forward process – just what I needed to move my travel photo’s from laptop to pc. I have encountered a problem at the final step though that I wondered if you could help with. I have imported the temporary folder as described but when I go to move the folders from the temporary folder into the location I want it to it comes up with a message that the images could not be moved. It does create a folder on my hard drive (where I keep all of my images) but it is empty and it doesn’t create a corresponding folder in Lightroom. Any help with this will be much appreciated.
Hi Stephanie, I don’t know offhand why that would be, unless on your laptop those photos were already missing (folders had question marks and/or thumbnails had !). If that’s not the case, then I’d suggest posting on Lightroom Queen forums, where you can engage in more of a back and forth and post screenshots as needed.
I followed all instructions and the photos transferred. Big problem: It deleted my current Lightroom catalog and somehow deleted several folders of photos during transfer. I know they were on my laptop because I had edited photos contained in those folders so I had to go back to my SD cards to retrieve them. I now have a tremendous mess of files that I am finding impossible to straighten out.
I’m sorry to hear it didn’t work well for you, Doris. The process can’t delete a catalog or folders of photos, so there has to be more to what happened. I’d be happy to do an online session with you to help you clean up – sessions are $135/hour (with an hour minimum). Contact us to schedule. Otherwise, if you have an Adobe subscription, you are entitled to free phone and chat support (and they can log into your computer, with your permission), so consider having them help you sort things out. That said, before you work with them, make sure you have a backup of your catalog and of your hard drive(s) containing your photos.
Hi Laura,
Yours has been the most straightforward explanation of the transfer process that I have seen.
I am ready to hit Save (to an external HD). So I will see how it goes.
Thank you.
Keith