Moving Lightroom image files to an external hard drive

[Ken Bennett]

OK, I searched here and on The Google for this topic, and got a lot of conflicting suggestions.

I have an old iMac at home, with a single internal drive. All my personal and freelance photos, around 40K files, are on the drive, along with the Lightroom CC catalog, the system, and all my other apps and data. I would like to move all my data to an external drive, and keep my system and applications on the internal drive. I'd like to get this working with the current iMac, to make the move to a new computer more seamless down the road.

1. What is the best practice for moving the raw files? Note that they are in the Pictures folder in my user folder, and I would like to keep them there. Do I just move the whole user folder and then tell Lightroom where to find the photos once they are moved?

2. Where should the Lightroom Catalog live? My first inclination is to leave it on the boot drive so when I get an SSD it will be much faster to access than on an external drive. Or should it live with the images themselves on the external?

3. Any suggestions for other things that should stay on the boot drive? Ideas for making this easier and more idiot proof?

Thanks!

Ken

[digitaldog]

1. What is the best practice for moving the raw files? Note that they are in the Pictures folder in my user folder, and I would like to keep them there. Do I just move the whole user folder and then tell Lightroom where to find the photos once they are moved?

2. Where should the Lightroom Catalog live? My first inclination is to leave it on the boot drive so when I get an SSD it will be much faster to access than on an external drive. Or should it live with the images themselves on the external?

3. Any suggestions for other things that should stay on the boot drive? Ideas for making this easier and more idiot proof?

1-2. Just drag and drop  em all from location to location to copy. And I wouldn't keep them in the Picture Folder on the boot disk. I would (do) dedicate an entire drive JUST for all images, LR catalog and all associated files. That means it's super easy to 'clone' that drive content to other drives; for location work, offsite backup, etc. SuperDuper, ChronoSync, there are a number of Mac app's for cloning drives. If you update images on the location drive, clone back to the other's (so a backup). You can take any of those drives and move them to any machine with a copy of LR and double click on the catalog on the drive, you're all set. You want to set LR's preferences to "Store presets with Catalog" so those important files are on that external disk and copied to all other's too.


3. Just the LR app. Note however, Adobe still places potentially important files on the boot disk! DNG camera profiles, Lens profiles etc. Drag. It's too bad they can't allow us to store and use them as they do the presets which can be kept on the drive with the catalog, previews and image files.

[John McDermott]

For #1 you have guessed the right answer. Just move the CONTENTS of the Pictures directory to the external drive (leave an empty Pictures directory on your internal drive) and tell LR where they are. The external drive will have it's own letter name, i.e., G: and you will need to set it to the same drive letter on the new computer.

The catalog can live in either place. If you place it on the external drive you can take the external drive and plug it into any computer that has LR installed. If portability in not important than leave it on the main drive.

You don't mention what directory structure you have but I recommend that you allow LR to create a directory structure by date/time. Managing files by directory structure (i.e., Family & Sports & holidays etc.) is unnecessary in LR as you identify and track photos by keywords.