Importing Lightroom 4 Catalog to PM 5

[mrfearless47]

I've decided that PM5 serves my ingesting purposes better than Lightroom 4.  My plan is to use PM 5 for ingesting and establishing all relevant metadata.  From there I want to take a subset of my photos into Lightroom for further editing and into Photoshop CS 6 if needed.  I find that Lightroom's ingestion process is slow, even on a Hexacore Mac Pro at 3.33 GHz on a RAIDED SSD plex.  I have about 80,000 photos already in Lightroom and I'm wondering if there is any way to read the Lightroom catalog to save reimporting every single photo.

Any suggestions on strategy?

[Kevin M. Cox]

So if I am understanding correctly, you want to use PM to edit the metadata on photos that are already in the Lightroom catalog?

[Kirk Baker]

I've decided that PM5 serves my ingesting purposes better than Lightroom 4.  My plan is to use PM 5 for ingesting and establishing all relevant metadata.  From there I want to take a subset of my photos into Lightroom for further editing and into Photoshop CS 6 if needed.  I find that Lightroom's ingestion process is slow, even on a Hexacore Mac Pro at 3.33 GHz on a RAIDED SSD plex.  I have about 80,000 photos already in Lightroom and I'm wondering if there is any way to read the Lightroom catalog to save reimporting every single photo.

Photo Mechanic is not a cataloging application and as such it will not import your Lightroom catalog.  But if your images are already on your hard drive(s) then Photo Mechanic can access them in place with no need to import anything.  If you haven't written all of the metadata from your Lightroom library to your images, you can do so and Photo Mechanic will see all of your metadata.

HTH,

-Kirk