Pablo Averbuj

Lightroom Import Success

Update: I posted excruciating detail in the following post.

I was able to successfully migrate my PSA tag associations to Lightroom. In terms of working time I probably spent about 3 or 4 hours working on it (highly interrupted). The process more or less broke down like thie:

1. Import the images into Lightroom
2. Use PSATool to dump PSA catalog to text file
3. Build keyword list from psa dumpfile
4. Import keyword list into Lightroom
5. Update the SQLite database to add the mappings

I could be a lot more turn key. It could be as simple as steps 2 and 5, but I wanted to manipulate the database directly as little as possible for my first attempt. There’s columns whose purpose is not entirely obvious to me and I’d just as well let Lightroom create most of the entries than do it myself. This way the only table we are manipulating directly is AgLibraryTagImage (the image < -> tag mappings), and this table is fairly simple. Likewise the AgLibraryTag table is easy to manipulate, but importing the keywords is the easiest step of the process (and there’s magic with the keyword lists it builds). Importing the files into Lightroom took a very long time (I’d guess 2-3 hours). And I only have about 5000+ images, some of the requesters on the Adobe boards had upwards of 15000. There is a lot of magic going on populating the Adobe_images and Adobe_imageFiles tables (mostly metadata caching).

I actually had written this post on Sunday night, thinking I had completed my task, but after I wrote this the import finished and it actually didn’t work. I thought I had missed some nuance of the schema but as it turns out, it was just a subtle bug in the import process. However, this led me to discover an reference that I hadn’t previously considered. To the side is a screenshot of my successful import.