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Can anyone tell me how to remedy this one please?
I'm running 2 Macs one is Snow Leopard and the other Mountain Lion (if that's relevant) I use LR 4.3 on both and using one hard drive on both from a particular shoot. When I take out the hard drive from one (MBP) and place it in the other (imac) LR loses not only the catalog but also all my presets too! It's really annoying having to keep loading them all up again.
Hope someone can help,
Cheers, Phil.
Are the following on the hard drive that you are moving ?
Catalog
Lightroom 4.lrcat
Previews
Lightroom 4 Previews.lrdata ( Not entirely necessary but saves you re-generating them )
Presets
Can be found here
Quote: Installed and custom presets and templates have filenames ending in .lrtemplate and are located in the [user name]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom folder.
If, when you open LR you find question mark ? on the images it means LR cannot reference ( find ) the catalog so you may have to give it a nudge in the rigth direction 
Thanks for the reply, the catalog is stored on both the external and also on both computers.
All my presets vanish too. This doesn't happen every time though which is perplexing.
Quote: Will give that a go tonight. Thanks.
Good luck. Just to underline, if it works, that you'll need to locate and load the catalog manually every time you change machines. Once you've done it, you can go back to 'loading the last used catalog' until you change machines again.
On Windows, you can set the disk to always assign itself a given drive letter - I set mine to W: - so that Lightroom (and any other program) will find its files automatically because the drive letter and thus paths remain the same. I don't know if you can do this on a Mac but I'd be very surprised if you can't.
I think I have it, The MBP LR didn't have "Keep presets with catalog" checked whereas the imac did. I hope it's as simple as that but I suppose time will tell. Thanks Lemmy. 
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