{"id":33364,"date":"2022-08-25T23:18:46","date_gmt":"2022-08-25T21:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbanflavour.pl\/how-to-move-lightroom-from-pc-to-mac\/"},"modified":"2026-10-05T07:39:41","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T05:39:41","slug":"how-to-move-lightroom-from-pc-to-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbanflavour.pl\/en\/how-to-move-lightroom-from-pc-to-mac\/","title":{"rendered":"How do I transfer Lightroom from PC to Mac?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"My<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Switching from PC to Mac for photo work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"My
The Samsung went up for sale<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"My
It was replaced by a 2015 MacBook Pro 15<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> and I honestly recommend it!<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\n
\n\n
\"A<\/figure>\n\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n
\n\n

A laptop for photo editing?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\nSee the post<\/span>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

Remember to back up!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/strong><\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where do you keep your photos?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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”<\/strong> option. If we keep our photos on a NAS<\/strong><\/a> 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

\"Update
If I move the Photos<\/strong> folder somewhere else, then by choosing Update Folder Location…<\/strong> I can point to its new place and Lightroom will fix the paths to all the dated sub-folders 2021<\/strong>, 2022<\/strong> and the Mobile<\/strong> folder.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

How to move a Lightroom catalogue from PC to Mac<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Find the catalogue<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n