Lightroom Question regarding merging 2 catalogs.

I am leaving for a two month stay in Florida soon and am wondering whether I can do the following, and if so how? I plan to create a new LR catalog on my laptop with nothing in it. I plan to keep track of all the images I shoot while I am in Florida in this Catalog (call it Florida - 2015.lrcat). I further plan to do some editing both in LR and PS and also keyword each image (I will copy my master keyword file from my desktop here at home to LR on the laptop) . The physical files will reside on the laptop and will be in date order as the master at home. All this will work just fine as I have done this successfully in the past. Now the question: How do I merge the catalog and the image files from the laptop to the computer at home with the minimum amount of trouble. I have spent hours trying to find the answer to this question in numerous books and web sites. I sure hope someone can help me with this.

I've done this successfully a couple of times and it made a mess once -- no idea why. So I now avoid the need to do it.

Do you really need to merge the catalogs? If you shoot raw, set Catalog Settings > Metadata to write changes to .xmp files (they will also be in the Catalog). I do this even at home for redundancy. When I'm on the road I simply avoid using the black and white flags and Collections, which will need the Catalog to be merged. Then all you need to do is "Import" all the image files (their associated .xmp files will accompany them) to the home computer.

If you want to merge the catalogs, and can't find a useful answer, my advice would be -- don't. I don't want to give any advice beyond what you can find on the internet, and I do know it's confusing. But if you decide to, ALWAYS back up your catalog before you go mucking around. I both back it up and copy it to a safe location in case I need to retrieve it.

Thanks Diana, I like this approach and will give it a test run before I leave.

And I should have said that you can certainly use the black and white flags while traveling. I use the black to mark deletions and just delete those files sometime before copying to the home computer. The white flags I generally use at home to denote picks for further processing but when traveling I use the red flag for that (or some other tag like 5 stars) and when the pictures are in the home catalog I can select all those from the trip and convert them to white flags if I want to keep that system.

Diane - Thanks again for your help. In my looking around for help I ran into a book that is just what I have needed for some time. I don't know whether you have seen it or not so I thought I would pass it along with my recommendation. Title of the book(Ebook) is Adobe Lightroom 5 - The Missing FAQ by Victoria Bampton known as the Lightroom Queen. The book can be found on Amazon or on her website. Thanks again

Mac

That's a good book. She also has a web site with a Q&A thing -- or did, anyway. I did a quick Google search and got some "not found" errors. Maybe just a temporarily down situation?

I also really like Martin Evening's Lightroom books, but they're very detailed and can be heavy reading. And there is always the Adobe Lightroom Forum -- excellent expert answers.