Migration
The real question in a migration
Leaving Lightroom Classic isn’t scary because of the images, they’re on the disk, but because of everything you’ve built around them: years of ratings, keywords, collections, culling. So the honest question is: element by element, what carries over, and what has limits? Here’s a detailed reading, with no magic promises.
What carries over faithfully
- Star ratings (0–5): the selection rating, brought over as is.
- Color labels: the curation color labels.
- Rejects and picks: the culling flags, preserved.
- Keywords: converted to tags and added to the thesaurus, ready to consolidate.
- Collections, including nested ones: brought over with their hierarchy and order.
These make up the bulk of your culling work, exactly what you fear losing.
What carries over with a transformation
- Virtual copies: brought over as versions of a single asset, rather than as ghost files.
- Stacks: converted into relationships between images (instead of a Lightroom-specific stack).
- Develop history: archived verbatim for reference, with no reinterpretation of the rendering, the record of settings is kept without claiming to reproduce the Lightroom preview pixel for pixel.
What has limits, honestly
- Smart collections: their rules don’t always translate identically; they may arrive as manual collections to recreate.
- Missing originals: if Lightroom pointed to absent or disconnected files, no migration invents them, they remain to be found.
- Previews: Lightroom previews are tool-specific caches; they aren’t originals and aren’t meant to be brought over as is.
- Rendering portability: a RAW develop depends on the engine that produced it. Changing tools means, sooner or later, reinterpreting the rendering.
Knowing these limits before you migrate avoids the nasty surprise and lets you decide with full knowledge.
The original catalog stays intact
Key point: a good migration reads the .lrcat catalog read-only. Your Lightroom catalog is not modified; if the file is locked, a working copy is used. So you’re not gambling anything: you can migrate a sample, compare, and keep using Lightroom in parallel.
In practice
- Migrate a representative catalog first, not the biggest one.
- Check collections, ratings, and keywords as a priority.
- Spot missing originals and smart collections to recreate early.
- Treat develop history as a reference, not a guaranteed rendering.
Obscura Flow imports the .lrcat read-only and brings over curation, keywords, nested collections, virtual copies, and stacks, while archiving develop history for reference. Migration erases nothing: it transfers your organization to a foundation built to last, without touching the original catalog.