Lightroom 4 to 5: Upgrade existing catalog or create new?

[JClishe]

I'm in the process of upgrading from Lightroom 4 to 5. In Martin Evening's LR5 book he suggests creating an empty catalog instead of upgrading the LR4 catalog, and then exporting / importing your images from LR4 to 5. He mentions that Publish Services will not come over using this method, but he doesn't specifically mention anything else. I have import presets, export presets, develop presets, metadata presets, filename presets, etc etc. Basically lots of stuff in my LR4 catalog. Will all of these presets come over as part of the export / import process? I'm OK with a little extra work if creating a new LR5 catalog and then importing into it is a cleaner approach, but if I have to recreate *ALL* of my presets from scratch, that may be more work than I care to take on and I'll just upgrade my LR4 catalog.

Curious what others have done. Thanks.

 

[kathyt]

I always upgrade my existing and all my presets come over with it. I separate my catalogs into years. So I will start a new catalog in 2014.

 

[JClishe]

Cool, thanks. The part I'm most unsure about is if I don't upgrade my existing my catalog but instead create a new empty catalog, export images from old catalog and import them into new one - will the presets come with them?

 

[DGMPhotography]

I just did the same thing! LR 5 looks beautiful! I don't have any custom presets though so I'm afraid I can't offer a valid input here, but I did simply upgrade my catalog and everything works as intended. Is it weird though that I routinely delete my catalog??

 

[JClishe]

Is it weird though that I routinely delete my catalog??

Uhh, yeah. Why would you do that?

 

[Braineack]

I've gone from 3.2 to 4 to 5 without issues upgrading the catalogs over, even moving it to different hard drives/OS.

 

[DGMPhotography]

Uhh, yeah. Why would you do that?

Save space on my computer. I just back up all my photos on my external hd.

 

[kathyt]

Cool, thanks. The part I'm most unsure about is if I don't upgrade my existing my catalog but instead create a new empty catalog, export images from old catalog and import them into new one - will the presets come with them?

All of your presets should be in the same location. If they don't carry over then you can just copy and paste them into the new catalog. When you are in LR there is a place that will show you where your presets live.

 

[JClishe]

Uhh, yeah. Why would you do that?

Save space on my computer. I just back up all my photos on my external hd.

I still don't understand though. Why would you delete your catalog? If your objective is to save space and move your images to an external HD, then just do that. Why delete the catalog?

 

[JacaRanda]

Hi Jason,

This little video may help if you have not figured it out already.

Lightroom Video ? Installing and Organizing Your Presets in Lightroom 5 | Lightroom Killer Tips

 

[DGMPhotography]

Uhh, yeah. Why would you do that?

Save space on my computer. I just back up all my photos on my external hd.

I still don't understand though. Why would you delete your catalog? If your objective is to save space and move your images to an external HD, then just do that. Why delete the catalog?

I dunno... I just like having things looking clean xD