How do I transfer Lightroom from PC to Mac?

I started my photography adventure on a Samsung laptop running Windows, and when I bought it I mainly looked at the specs of what was inside. Then I bought some external monitor and struggled on like that for a few years, until I realised that a TN panel and a cheap IPS monitor aren’t the best combination for photo work. Even though, for those days, I had an Intel Core i7 processor (the bigger the “i”, the better, right?), 16GB of RAM and a fancy Samsung SSD that I’d added to make it run at all. It was bearable, but sometimes the system decided that 16GB of RAM wasn’t enough and closed some program at its own discretion. I’d had enough.

Switching from PC to Mac for photo work

Time for a serious decision. At first I thought that if I bought a PLN 3000 laptop plus more RAM and an SSD, I’d have a speed and performance demon. But after tests and some serious research I decided to switch to a 2015 MacBook Pro 15.

It was also an i7, supposedly, but 4th generation instead of 2nd, the same amount of RAM and a small 256GB SSD, though PCI-E rather than SATA, and still working on the Mac was far more pleasant. Nothing crashed with the same amount of RAM, I didn’t have to reformat the drive because the system had problems and collected junk, and on top of that the feel of the machine and the quality of the screen for those days gave me real joy at work. Today I work on a MacBook Pro 14 and I honestly recommend it!

A laptop for photo editing?

If you’re wondering which laptop to buy for photo editing and what to look out for, have a look at the post I wrote on that topic.

See the post

Remember to back up!

When I had installed all the programs on the new computer, I still had to deal with moving the photos and the Lightroom catalogue. You have to be careful here so you don’t make a mess. It’s best to copy the contents of the whole drive to an external USB drive. If we’re not sure what we’ll need, it’s better to copy everything to the external drive, then gradually move all the files back to bring our data and program settings to the state we had on the previous laptop.

These days a decent 1TB SSD on USB 3.2 Gen 2, with transfer speeds of around 1000MB/s and hard to damage with shocks, costs about PLN 500. Check out the Samsung T7 1TB. I use the older Samsung T5, which transfers at around 500MB/s, and you can already work on it very quickly, even edit photos. Copying a large number of photos and other files won’t take you long.

Where do you keep your photos?

It’s good if all our photos are in one folder that contains all the sub-folders. Then we can move it to the new computer and, after moving the catalogue, point to the photos’ location with the “Update folder location” option. If we keep our photos on a NAS network drive, we only need to point to the path on the new computer. But let’s start with moving the Lightroom catalogue, and we’ll come back to this at the end.

On my network drive I have a separate share (a kind of partition on NAS servers) called Urbanflavour, and everything inside is split by year. On the laptop it looks exactly the same.

How to move a Lightroom catalogue from PC to Mac

Find the catalogue

To move our catalogue we first need to find where it is, which is very simple. Either we already know where we created the catalogue, or we can find out by opening Lightroom Classic and choosing from the menu:

• From the top menu choose: Lightroom Classic -> Catalog Settings
• Keyboard shortcut: Options + Command + comma

In the Catalog Settings window, the first thing you’ll see is the General tab, which starts with an Information section, and the first item there is the path to your Lightroom catalogue. Just click Show and you can see your catalogue. In my case the catalogue path was

For me it’s Location: /Volumes/UF/Catalogs/_LightroomCAT so I copy the _LightroomCAT catalogue.

Your catalogue may have a different name. By default it’s simply Lightroom and it’s located at /Users/[your username]/Pictures/Lightroom, but if you created the catalogue yourself somewhere else, you do exactly the same.

Move the most important files

Before we start moving files, close Lightroom Classic.

Catalogue files

The most important thing in the catalogue folder is the file with the .lrcat extension, and since Lightroom Classic 11 also the .lrcat-data file, which is just as important.

Helper files

Files ending in Helper.lrdata, Previews.lrdata, Smart Previews.lrdata and Sync.lrdata aren’t as important, so nothing will happen if we don’t move them. My catalogue, with thousands of photos from 10 years, is around 2GB, but the Previews and Smart Previews files can take up several dozen GB. These are thumbnails and previews of the photos, created while you browse the catalogue and edit photos. Lightroom will rebuild the Previews files by itself, and we can create Smart Previews ourselves.

Backups

In the folder you’ll also find a sub-folder called Backups, which creates backups of our catalogue on a set schedule. You don’t need the backups to open the catalogue in its new location, so you can delete them or leave them where they are.

I make such a backup once a month, because I also rely on Time Machine just in case.

Settings files and presets

The catalogue folder may also contain a Lightroom Settings folder (if we chose that earlier), which holds most of our Lightroom settings and, most importantly, presets!

By default, though, it is:

On Windows: C:users<username>appdataroamingAdobeCamera RawSettings

On a Mac: Macintosh HD/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Camera Raw/Settings

If you use a single catalogue, you may have chosen the option to save presets with the catalogue. It has its pros and cons (I’ll write a separate post about that). If you use this option, you need to move that folder so you don’t lose your settings and presets.

Important info

If you tick “Store Presets with this catalog” and haven’t used it until now, your settings won’t be copied. So if you’re already at the stage of moving the catalogue to a new computer, click “Show All Other Lightroom Presets” and copy that folder.

And if you want to keep all your settings in the catalogue folder, you can tick “Store Presets with this catalog” and copy the whole contents to the path inside the catalogue that Lightroom will create. You get to it with the same “Show All Other Lightroom Presets” button, and you’ll see that the path is now …/[your-catalogue]/Lightroom Settings

And one more thing. If you use several catalogues, this may not be the most convenient solution for you, because a new catalogue won’t see presets linked to another catalogue.

The presets folder

You’ll find the presets themselves exactly in the folder

C:Users[username]AppDataRoamingAdobeCameraRawSettings

Copy the catalogue to the new computer

You can copy the catalogue to the new computer in any way you like: online, with a memory card, a flash drive or a hard drive. I recommend a fast Samsung T7 SSD (the successor to the T5), which I got from my wife and which also holds my overflow of photos. When collaborating with other photographers it lets you move a large number of files quickly, so you can use such a portable SSD to move your photos from the laptop too, since external SSDs now come in similar capacities, from 512GB to 2TB.

Catalogue location

If we have a MacBook or any other Mac, we have one very fast SSD, so in terms of performance it doesn’t matter which partition the catalogue sits on. For convenience and safety when working on photos, though, I recommend creating a separate partition, or rather an APFS volume (volumes allocate space dynamically, so you don’t need to set their size in advance), and creating a place on it for the catalogue, or catalogues if you have several. In my opinion that’s a better solution than the default catalogue location inside the macOS user folders.

For me it’s the “UF” volume, with a “Catalogs” folder, and inside it I keep my main LR catalogue “_LightroomCAT” – /UF/Catalogs/_LightroomCAT. Earlier I kept the catalogue directly on the “UF” volume in a folder called “LRCat” or something similar. What matters is that the catalogue files sit in some folder, so they don’t get mixed up with other files and folders. In my case, the only folder I created myself is “Plugins” where I put the files for the JPEGmini and Pic-Time plugins.

Open the catalogue

Once we’ve copied the catalogue and Lightroom is installed, all we need to do is double-click the file with the .lrcat extension and the blue icon. Or we can open Lightroom Classic and choose File -> Open Catalog. Now everything is ready.

If we haven’t moved the previews files, photos may load a little slower at first. We can also generate Previews, 1:1 Previews or Smart Previews ourselves.