Setting up LR3 on my Laptop w/ preferences, keywords, presets

MomaZunk

What is the easiest way to get all of the preferences, presets, and keywords from my desktop LR3 to my laptop LR3?

I do not want to move any photos to my laptop. I am just setting it up for a trip.

I plan to import photos into a "trip" catalog while traveling, doing some tagging and minor editing on the laptop, and then export the trip catalog and import it into my desktop catalog when I return.

I have LR3 on my windows 7 64 desktop, and I installed LR3 on my Windows XP 32 laptop.

Could I use a backup copy of the desktop catalog, and just ignore the missing files message when using it on the laptop?
OR
Do I copy files from the preferences, presets folders to the laptop?

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,

Dee

malch

Sorry, I don't have any magic answers for you.

I'll just repeat a frequently made plea to software makers. Users really, really need to port their application settings to other machines from time to time. Please give us a way to do so. It's next to impossible if you hide them away in multiple files scattered all over our hard drives in Program Files, ProgramData, Users/user/AppData/Local, Users/user/AppData/Roaming as well as the system registry.

Yeah, we know there are some good reasons for storing different settings in different locations. But you could give us a way to merge them all together into a single file that can be imported into the program running on a different machine.

arodney

Dedicate a drive to hold all your images, the LR catalog and the presets (use preference Store with Catalog). Keep that on the main workstation. Then clone that drive to an external USB or FireWire drive and plug that into the Laptop. When you double click on the catalog, (or have LR set to open a specific catalog in preferences), everything is accessed from that dedicated drive. You do work on the road, update contents on that drive. You get back to the studio, you clone back the NEWER data on the external to the main drive (or just plug-in the external to the main machine). There are utilities for disk cloning that will do this job quickly and easily and you end up with a backup (or many backups) of all this important data. Being a Mac guy, I can’t recommend any specific utilities for Windows but there has to be many.