Restoring a partial database after editing and cataloging the entire database

[timhoy]

Hello all,
I am lost in the details and can't see the big picture, pardon the pun.
I have been maintaining all photos on a desktop PC.
I bought a new LG Gram 17 in laptop, I love it and highly recommend it.
I downloaded all photos to laptop on day one.
I used the laptop exclusively for almost a year. In that time I added a few thousand new pics, and used a lot of time cataloging the entire database.
Now I want to restore all to the PC , without losing all the edits and organization that I made to many of photos already on the PC.
Am I overthinking this or under thinking it,
Thank you in advance.
Tim Hoy

[Greyfox]

...Now I want to restore all to the PC , without losing all the edits and organization that I made to many of photos already on the PC.

A number of things that are needed to give a proper answer are not clear from your post.

1/. Is the intention to bring the PC in line with the laptop, and to continue to access the images from both the PC and the laptop?.

2/. Where are the photos currently?. It appears from your post that you may have copied all of the ones from the PC to the laptop, then added new ones to the laptop since then. Are all of the photos you want to keep currently on the laptop?. Are you planning on copying them all to the PC, or perhaps to an external drive?.

3/. Were you "maintaining" the original collection of photos on the PC with ACDSee, and if so, exactly what version and release?

4/. What software was used to "catalog" and "edit" the photos on the laptop. Again if ACDSee exactly what version and release?

5/. If you have been using ACDSee on both the PC and the laptop, have you been embedding the ACDSee metadata in the images, or is your complete "catalog" only present in the database on the portable and perhaps a partial database on the PC, or does the laptop not contain a complete database?.

If you have not been embedding the metadata in the images themselves, then I would strongly recommend you do so as a safeguard. If the metadata is embedded in the images, it can be always be read back from the images into a database.