Okay, so we've done quite a bit of work. Now with our catalog management, we've looked at the catalog structure we've looked at importing into our catalog, we've looked at creating multiple catalogs. And now I'd like to look at splitting catalogs and merging catalogs. So taking one and dividing it into two or making a separate catalog, and then taking two catalogs and merging them together as one. So what I'm going to do here in my stunt catalog, the catalog we've been in all day, the regular catalog, with 1700. And so images in how about we just go in and go attribute, let's say select four or more stars, and that gives me 149 of the 17,000 images 149 of the 17,000 and I'm just going to go command it Select All, Command A to select all, and I'm going to go File, Export as catalog.

So this is going to create a brand new catalog from old days images that will will be a standalone separate from this one. So when I go export catalog, it asks me to give it a name. And it says it's going to export 162 plus three Virtual Copies. Virtual Copies we haven't talked about yet, that's in session three, but I'll just the Virtual Copies basically a duplicate of the preview. So you can have multiple versions of an image, you can have a black and white version and a color version, for example. And Virtual Copies are great for facilitating that.

Now export selected photos only. This is what we want to do just selected 160 to export negative files as well. Now this depends, if we want to create a brand new standalone catalog that we can take off on another computer away from all these other images and assets and have it work then by all means we want to include the negative files. But if we just want to create a new catalog that still references the original files, then we wouldn't create them so it depends which you want to do. But in this case, I'm going to include the negatives So I can type the whole thing off to a new location. Now it says Do you want to build or include smart previews, so there's no smart previews here.

And I'm not gonna bother building any for now, because all these images are here on the computer so it's not necessary. And finally include available previews. So, absolutely want to do that. So we just give it a name test. And we go ahead and click Export catalog and Lightroom is going to create a brand new catalog file, it's going to create a brand new preview data file, and it's going to create a brand new folder with all the negatives nicely arranged. Now if I went ahead and did that, it's going to take about probably about 10 minutes because I know that because I've done it already.

So without putting you through that. Here's one I prepared earlier. I'm going to hit cancel and I'm going to deselect all these guys. I'm just going to go down to my finder on the desktop where I copied it and you can see I called it export cat test. And you can see we've got the catalog file, which is only 42 megabytes we've Got the preview data, which is half a gigabyte, 490 megabytes. And we've got this little travel photos folder.

That's just nicely taken the necessary images. There's some barley, what do we got 14 from Bali, we got 59 from Cambodia, six from China, 44 from Japan and 53 from Spain. So these are all the photos that made the cut for my new highlights catalog. So now we should go and have a look at it. So I'm going to close here. And from this catalog, I should be able to go File, Open recent.

And no it actually it doesn't show up. And I've been racing because I haven't opened that catalog before. So I'll go open catalog instead. And I'll never get to my export cat and choose that catalog and open. So now it's going to have to relaunch it's going to quit that catalog. Launch the new one.

And here it comes. Oh, it's taking a Sunday. We got to So, here it is. So here's my brand new catalog brand new self sustaining standalone, self contained, I meant to say not self sustaining, what does that mean? So all photographs hundred and 62 in total, on the Macintosh hard drive in the travel photos folder, nine Valley 62, Cambodia. So that's how we split catalogs.

That's how we split catalogs. Now, if I totally wanted to split this catalog off from the other one and remove every trace, then I'd need to go back and delete all these photos from the other catalog. But in this case, I don't want to do that I want to keep them. I just want to be able to take this catalogue of for other purposes. So if that all makes sense of it's funny thing to explain, splitting catalogs when it comes to do include the negatives or not. I always wish I had a clearer, clearer sort of set of instructions there.

But the reality is, it depends. The reality is it depends on whether you want to take the new catalog off to another computer where it doesn't have access to the original No negatives, or are you happy to still connected to the same hard drive. So there we have a split, split catalog. Good to go. So my next trick, I'm going to merge catalogs, I'm going to take this small catalog, and I'm going to merge it with another catalog. So I'm going to quit out of here.

And I'm going to relaunch Lightroom. And I'm going to open my studio catalog just for the hell of it. I'm going to open my studio catalog, and I'm going to show you how to merge that export catalog into this one. So I'm going to go in my studio catalog back to where we were a couple of videos ago. I simply go file and import import from another catalog. Where is it?

There we go. Sorry, I'm talking and struggling to find things at the same time. But there we go file and import from another catalog. So what this enables me to do and this is exactly what I do when I go overseas. I create a new catalog for that trip. As I said I'm off to China in four weeks time.

I'll make a new catalog when I get there, I'll do all my work in that catalog. I'll do all my keywording Mike my image adjustments, then when I get back home, I will just import that whole thing into my big travel catalog, put it in the 2017 folder on my Drobo. And I'm good to go. I just want I just won't be using keyword hierarchies you might remember me mentioning back in session one because that's where you can get into trouble there. So import from another catalog I choose. I go to the desktop, my export catalog test, I choose my just choose the catalog file and all the information is in there.

And Lightroom says okay, what do we got here? gives me this little warning it says I'm about to import a catalogue with 162 photos, nine of them a Bali 62 of them in Cambodia, and so on and so on. I could I could at this point choose to omit certain ones I might say don't include the Bali ones are not but I'm gonna do that. So file handling. It says Do you want to add the new photos to the catalog without moving, copy the new photos to a new location and import or don't import new photos now, I'm not I'm actually not sure how when you use that option, don't import new photos. Every time I demonstrate this we we scratch our heads on that one and think when what why would you be importing a catalog?

Not importing the new photos? Not sure. Anyway, maybe one day I'll come up with a an answer to that question. So it says if there are existing photos that need to be replaced what we do, but in this case there are not. So everything's good to go. I click Import and incomes my brand new catalog.

Incomes my or my merged merged catalog, I should say. So it's just going through a little bit of a process there checking everything and what you'll see when it comes in is that we've now got a new hard drive. So I'll actually I'll just let that finish doing its thing you'll see over here in my folders tab it's now demonstrating that it is referencing not one but two separate hard drives. There we go. Here they are. So everything as I left it everything as I left it back in my previous catalog all coming here in asleep.

Notice they're displaying in added order by now I might just change that to writing to get my writing order. And that's how we expect to see them. And over here we can see this catalog now has 12,000 images, it is sourcing those images from two different hard drives, all the Drobo stuff that's currently offline, and all the travel photos that are currently online, because these are the photos here on my Macintosh hard drive. So that's hopefully a process that's made sense to you all where I've split one catalog into two, and I've merged two catalogs into one. All very easy to do, providing you keep track of your catalog files, your preview data And of course, your negatives. And when in fact the pre you don't really need to keep track of the preview data that takes care of itself, but it's really it's the negatives, you really need to take care of to make sure that they are moving to the right place copying when necessary, on otherwise not copying.

So yep, there we go. We've just split catalogs. We've just merged catalogs and hopefully you found that a useful process