Lightroom 5 upgrade - PSA

EntropicTendencies

Hi Folks,

We've over the last year we've found that there is a right way and a number of wrong ways to upgrade Lightroom and preserve your catalog contents (including all the publish service information).

The right way:

The correct (and painless) way to upgrade to LR4 or LR5 is to install the new version of Lightroom, start the application and then when opening the catalog select your existing catalog. At this point Lightroom will offer to upgrade your catalog, creating a new copy of the database. If your old catalog used myphotos.lrcat, the upgraded version will be created as myphotos-2.lrcat. Your old .lrcat file is not not modified or discarded in this process and you can still downgrade.

This method does not lose any information from the catalog and the SmugMug (and any other publish services) will be preserved. Since Lightroom hasn't thrown away any info there is no need to sync your catalog with SmugMug.

If you are upgrading from LR3 then I would recommend that you install the latest version of the plugin before you upgrade (the plugin is shipped separately in LR4/LR5).

The current version of the plugin (1.0.6.8 or later) is supported for LR3, LR4 and LR5.

Some wrong ways:

• Any variant of export/import catalog - this strips a lot of information from the database including collections and publish services.
  
  LR4/LR5 is not part of this problem - it is a feature of LR and it would be the same when exporting/importing with the same version on source and destination. This is not really an upgrade of the catalog though it does have a similar effect (it's an import of old catalog data into a new catalog - with emphasis on import and its limitations in Lightroom).
  
  
• Copying the images (with XMP sidecar files) to a new location and building a new catalog by importing them.

If you do encounter problems after upgrading then STOP. Revert to the old version (your old catalog should still be intact) and raise a support ticket (http://help.smugmug.com).

Barrie
Smugmug Support Hero

mbonocore

Great information Barrie. I left this morning STILL waiting for my catalog to finish upgrading. I will know once I get home how it went.