Time To Combine All Your Lightroom Classic Catalogs Into Just One

It’s a new year, and time to get your Lightroom life organized (that was one of New Year’s resolutions for 2022, right?). One thing you can do to make your Lightroom life so much easier is to combine all your existing Lightroom catalogs into just one catalog, where you can find everything without searching through different catalogs and having to restart Lightroom and all that stuff (this is just for Classic users – the cloud version already uses just one catalog for all your images).

So, let’s start this year off right by making your Lightroom life easier, faster, simpler, and more fun by moving to a “one catalog life.” Here’s how (it’s really easy, and will take way less time than you’d think):

STEP ONE: You can pick one existing catalog and combine your others into it, or you might want to simply start with a brand new, empty, fresh catalog, and then import all your other catalogs into this shiny clean new one. I’ll cover both in this post, but if you’re going the “start with a fresh new catalog route,” go under the File menu and choose New Catalog (as shown above). If you’re going to stick with an existing catalog, and just add other catalogs to it, you can skip this STEP ONE, and just open the catalog you want to be your main catalog, and then follow the next steps below.

STEP TWO: Go under the File menu again, but this time choose “Import from Another Catalog.” Now go find your other Lightroom catalogs and one by one, add them to this catalog using that “Import from Another Catalog” command.

STEP THREE: Each time you choose to import a catalog, it brings up a window (shown above) asking if you want all that stuff from that catalog imported (all your collections and such), and if for some reason you don’t, uncheck any checkboxes next to collections you don’t want to be imported (this list is worth looking at for a sec – this is an excellent time to do some housekeeping and not import Collections you just don’t care about having in Lightroom any longer). If you turn on the “Show Preview” checkbox (as I have here) and you click on any collection, it will show you thumbnails of what’s inside that collection (as seen here).

That’s all there is to it. In just a few minutes (less time than you’d think), all your catalogs are combined into one single catalog, and your Lightroom life just got a whole lot easier, faster, and more organized. It’s a big step and one totally worth taking, and a perfect way to kick off 2022.

Have a great Monday everybody!

-Scott

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