Export a catalog

[Learn The How To series from Adobe] [Lynda.com presents] [The following is an excerpt from the training tutorial at Lynda.com] [Photoshop Lightroom 4 Essentials Organizing and Sharing with the Library Module With Chris Orwig] >> There are a number of different reasons why you may want to take some or all of your images and export them as a stand-alone catalog.

And typically, the reasons why you may want to do this is because you might be working on multiple computers.

Perhaps, you have a laptop, you have a catalog on that, you need to get those images in that catalog on to the desktop, or maybe you have a studio manger or an assistant and what want to do is pass off some photos that you've already you worked on in Lightroom.

You want to give that person all of those photos with all of your work so they can then finish it off and maybe design a book or create some prints or upload an online web gallery.

So whatever the situation, what I want to look at here is how we can export all or some of our photographs as a catalog.

Now one of the things that you're gonna want to do is make a selection.

You can make a selection of a folder of images, of a collection, whatever.

You're gonna select a folder, this folder Beach Family.

Next, I'm gonna navigate to my File pull-down menu and here I'm gonna choose Export as Catalog.

Now when I do this, I can choose a location, in this case, the desktop.

I want save this out as "Beach_Family," just gonna keep the name exactly the same.

Underneath, it allows me to determine some export settings.

It says, you're gonna export a catalog with 23 photos.

All of the photos in this folder or if you had chosen a collection, the collection, either one works.

Now do I want to Export Selected Photos Only?

No, all of them.

[Export Negative Files] Export the negative files, what that means is the original files, if you have raw files, maybe you've created some virtual copies.

Do you want to export the originals or the raws or what?

Yes, I want to export the original files.

I also want to include any available previews.

So great, it's all I need to do there and then simply click Export.

Now this is gonna export a new catalog.

And what we can do is we can take a look at this catalog.

Let's minimize the Lightroom interface for a second.

And what I'm gonna do is find this folder.

And here it is on my desktop over here, I'm just gonna move it over so we can see that and then open this folder up.

Now when I open this folder up, what we'll see is that we now have a new catalog.

Inside of this catalog, we have exercise files, and photos, and people, and then there is the Beach Family.

The nice thing about this is it remembers the file or folder structure, the folder hierarchy?

In other words, it just takes the files the way you had them and then exports it as now a stand-alone catalog.

Now what do I mean by a stand-alone catalog?

Well, what we can do then is we could take this catalog and we could import it, like we looked out in the previous movie and combined that with another catalog if we had one opened or we could just open this one by itself.

Let me show you how this works.

So here in Lightroom, I'm gonna navigate to File, Open Catalog.

Now the catalog that I'm gonna navigate to is Beach Family, and then I'll click Open.

What this will do is, it will close and then relaunch Lightroom.

I'll go ahead and skip my back up this time, because I just did that a few minutes ago.

And this will then open up Lightroom with this catalog that's been exported from Lightroom.

And now if I expand Lightroom so we can actually see what we have here and go to our Folders.

Again, it just has these photos and you can see they're all in the same spot and we could work on these images in any way, shape, or form.

So as you can see, you can make a selection of photographs and you can export them as a stand-alone catalog, and that catalog will contain all of the information that we've talked about in those previous movies.

All of the things that you've done to the files, Metadata or Develop Settings or Ratings, anything that you've done with those images, it will remember that and it will be contained in this exported stand-alone catalog.