Choose File > Import LRCAT catalog… and pick your .lrcat file. Imago reads it directly. You do not need a professional photo organizer installed.

Steps

1. Open the library you want the photos in. To start a new one, use File > New Library….
2. Choose File > Import LRCAT catalog….
3. Pick your LRCAT catalog, the file that ends in .lrcat. You can also give File > Open Library… a LRCAT catalog folder. Imago then offers this import instead of making a library there.
4. Wait for the import to finish. It runs in the background, with a progress row in the activity stack at the top left. A message reports how many photos were added.

If you change your mind, one Edit > Undo reverses the changes to the catalog.

What comes across

• Ratings, picks and rejects, and colour labels
• Keywords, including hierarchical ones, and XMP metadata
• Collections and collection sets, which become albums
• Virtual copies
• Develop settings that Imago can map

Original files stay where they are, and Imago refers to them in place. Photos whose originals are missing stay in the library so you can relink them later. Imago never changes your LRCAT catalog or your originals.

What does not match

• Develop settings are an approximation. Camera profiles, the vendor's AI models and some masking and retouch fields are not reproduced, and settings Imago cannot map are reported.
• Smart collections become regular albums that hold the photos they contain at the time of import.
• a professional photo organizer's process version is not carried over. Imported photos use Imago's newest rendering.

Good to know

• Before it changes anything, Imago tries to save your source settings, history and collections in a recovery archive in the library's Interop folder. This is best effort. If it fails, the photos are still imported with a warning.
• Importing the same catalog again does not duplicate virtual copies or collections. By default, edits you already made in Imago are kept.
• A big catalog can take a long time. In one report on an earlier version, 38,000 photos took about 25 minutes from a USB SSD.
• To stop the import, click ✕ on its row in the activity stack. This works while Imago reads the catalog. Once it starts adding the photos, it finishes.
• The browser version cannot import a catalog.