Photoshop Lightroom: Import/Export Catalogs?

I teach digital photography at Austin Community College in the photographic technology degree program. We spend a significant amount of time on Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom. I thought that with the introduction of Lightroom things would get somewhat easier for students who had never operated in the digital darkroom. It hasen't been as easy as I thought. Understanding the relationship between the software, the catalog, and the image files is difficult for many to grasp. One problem, that I often encounter, is what to do when a student has created more than one catalog with work-in-progress on images in the respective Develop modules. How does one combine the catalogs into one? How can I keep the history for the images? There is no "merge catalogs" command, but I have found a work-around to get the catalogs merged together.

You cannot export a catalog into another catalog, but you can import a catalog into another catalog. In the destination catalog, select File>Import from Catalog. You select the the catalog you wish to import (or merge if you like) and make the appropriate selections relative to moving/copying image files to a location, etc. When the import is complete, you will have the images with history in a single catalog.

Try it out if you find youself in a multi catalog dilemma.