Ability to work with Lightroom for Mac

[Emile]

It would be great if the ability to import a Lightroom catalogue would be extended to include such catalogues generated by Lightroom on a Mac. Although the catalogues themselves are compatible the paths are not (Volumes versus mapped drives). What could be done is allow a user to import the LR catalogue first, without asking where the images are located, and after the import has been completed to let them choose the image location.

I realise there may not be that many Mac Lightroom users who want to return to Windows just to run iMatch (though I am one of them), but the ability to use an iMac database via a browser now opens the Mac market too (provided you have a Windows PC to run the database on). hence the request.

[Mario]

I have never seen a Lr catalog created on the Mac. And I have no idea how the Mac manages file system organization or how Lr maps these to the catalog database. Adobe publishes no documentation for the Lr catalog.
The Lr importer app for IMatch is based on reverse-engineering of existing Lr catalogs. Can you upload a Mac catalog somewhere? And some information about how you "see" the files and folders on your Mac? As I said, I have no access to any Apple devices, this is a Windows / Linux ship only. I don't even know people who use Mac (except for iPhones).

What happens, for example, when you open a Lr catalog that was created on a Mac in Lr on Windows?
Does Lr somehow show you the Max folder names and asks you for their locations on the Windows PC?

IMatch would need to to that, because it needs to find the files before it can import data (except for the keyword catalog).

[Emile]

Hi Mario,

If you drop me a line privately I will send you link to a Mac catalogue that you can download. As to how Mac users "see" the database, as far as I remember this is the same for both Windows and OSX. Anyway a LR catalogue consists of (I am using my "Work" catalogue as an example):
Work Previews.lrdata
Work Smart Previews.lrdata
Work.lrcat [the actual catalogue]
Work.lrcat-journal
Work.lrcat.lock

The last two are created on the fly when the catalogue is opened and are deleted when closing the catalogue. The first two contains previews (thumbnails) for the catalogue. LR only really needs the lrcat file to run. If there is no Previews file it will just recreate the thumbnails.

It has been many years since I first switched from Windows to Mac and consequently from iMatch to Lightroom. From what I remember I used LR Windows as an intermediary between iMatch and LR on the Mac. I can no longer really test that since my Windows version of LR is 3 and my Mac version is CC/6.

[Jingo]

You can open the same LR database on a MAC that you can on a PC... but - and it's a big but - is how you have accessed your images within the database.  If you do not use network drives - and your images are not centrally stored or duplicated in both systems, you will have trouble.  You can get around this to create a new LR catalog for PC by using network shares, duplicating the photos and then using the Find Missing Folders options.. but sometimes it is easier to just recreate the DB on the PC.

[Mario]

Hi Mario,
If you drop me a line privately I will send you link to a Mac catalogue that you can download.

Thanks. You can send me the link to support email address.