Phil4adobe2LR wrote:
But it seems both you and the other "pros" who have responded to this discussion seem to want to discourage exporting of images which have been modified/developed in LR. As if you are saying: "just leave them in LR". But why do we enhance/modify images anyway? I do it so that I can give a pro vendor the final image file to print on canvas or other media so I can sell to the public. I do not know about you, but I do not own a commercial professional printer which takes up a huge amount of space and costs a small fortune. So I can't just print them myself from LR. I also do not regularly sell to a user online so that all I need to do is send them the LR file. Rather, I either upload to the vendor or save on a flash drive to give to the printer. As far as saving memory space goes, I use a lot of flash drives so I don't take up too much space on my hard drive. And my external file system seems to work well for me. Every image I modify in LR has an indicator right in the file name so I know where it came from. Ok??
Re-reading what others wrote, I don't see anyone discouraging exporting as a way to make photos available to printers or to send to people or to upload to a web site. In fact, exporting is the proper way to make a photo that has been edited in Lightroom available to printers or e-mail or uploading.
What was said is that exporting as a way to get your Lightroom 3 photos into Lightroom 5 is the wrong thing to do. I agree completely with this. This is most likely in response to your comment in reply 5 in this thread where you said "Firstly I usually export an image which I've modified to a completely separate directory totally outside and apart from LR. THEN suppose I import THAT image to my newly downloaded LR5 in order to modify it further." The right thing to do, as explained by others is to upgrade the LR 3 catalog to a LR 5 catalog, or import the LR3 catalog into LR 5.