I have a simular situation that i’ll use for the first time in the next days, but it’s not exactly what’s called Folder Synchronisation as described in the video.

I’ll use a laptop where during vacation i’ll will store all my shoots and doing a develop with LR2.3. This will create a RAW file + .xmp file on the laptop HD.
Afterwards, back home, i’ll transfer those folders to my desktop where i’ll doing all the further develop processes. Once transfered, these folders will be deleted on the laptop.

My question is: How to “import” those folders in the LR library on my desktop with the .xmp files included. This will save me a lot of processing time.
Can this with the normal import function of LR and will it skip the rendering process?

I perfectly understand Steve’s job with SyncToy but, like in the video, I understand that there already must be a foldername created inside LR before synchronisation can happen.
In my case, there will be a new folder on the desktop not imported yet by LR and I doubt that LR will recognise the .xmp files already existing and will recommence the whole rendering process again.

Any idea?

I actually use this feature to synchronize my entire photo collection between my desktop and my laptop (almost 8000 photos). I use Microsoft’s SyncToy to compare the photo directories on my laptop and my desktop and it automatically copies the picture files and any xmp files across all directories, based on whichever one is newest. After SyncToy is done, I then go to lightroom, select the top level folder for my photos, and sync everything. It finds the updated xmp files and applies the settings that have changed and also finds the new pictures as well (if any were copied to that machine). You have to sync folders on both the desktop and laptop when doing it this way.

Over a wireless connection this process would take forever, but connected via ethernet, it doesn’t take that long. It allows you to have your full collection, synchronized, on both machines.

Karen

As an example – if you have 180 files in a folder – then save a file from this folder you have been working on in photoshop under a different name – you now have 181 files in the folder. Synchronise the folder and it will of course find the extra file – but it then shows up 180 missing files as above – even though they are not missing! Weird….

Lightroom does this every time and I have no idea why or how to get rid of it. Very annoying. You can even see it briefly in Matts Video.

Casey Figlewicz