Camera Labs

I know the subject isn't very well phrased, but I will explain it.

I recently installed a new motherboard, CPU and RAM. All is well, until I install Lightroom again. (All files/programs were erased due to my OS upgrade at the same time).

(When I made the back up I simply copied and pasted them from my original Lightroom catalog). Bad idea. I load my backed up images into Lightroom, and discover, to my horror, that my 3500 images don't have any keywords. I tried everything, but the keywords are indeed gone. It wasn't all bad though. It gave me a chance to properly look through all my images, and throw away a lot of them, but it still sucked to manually type in keywords for 2000+ images.

In a couple of months, I'll be buying new hard drives as well ( I wrote about my probable solution in this thread http://www.cameralabs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21199)

My question is this: How should I make sure that I won't loose my keywords the next time I install Lightroom all over again? Since I'll be replacing my hard drive, I'll need to transfer the images WITH my keywords. That's the important thing. I don't want to end up loosing them all over again. Any suggestions?

All replies are appreciated.

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Nikon D90 (Primary), Nikon D40 (Backup)
AF-S DX 35mm f/1,8
AF-S 60mm f/2,8 micro
AF-S DX 55-200mm f/4-5.6 VR
2 x Speedlight SB-600

LR's database is kept in the Lightroom folder in your catalog. I have mine set to backup every week (it creates a small database backup in the same folder), and then I manually copy everything to another drive.

I would presume the keywords are either saved to the file (EXIF?), kept in an XMP sidecart file, or stored into lightrooms database.

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I take pictures so quickly, my highschool was "Continuous High".

Sounds likely. Should I make an export of all my images when changing hard drives? If I export all the images, the keywords should follow...I am right?

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Nikon D90 (Primary), Nikon D40 (Backup)
AF-S DX 35mm f/1,8
AF-S 60mm f/2,8 micro
AF-S DX 55-200mm f/4-5.6 VR
2 x Speedlight SB-600

I think you are right, BUT....you'd lose all your original files, or any edits to those would lack the keywords when you export them again.

perhaps you can export the whole catalog, that might work.

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I take pictures so quickly, my highschool was "Continuous High".