Changing HD's

[MikeMike]

Hey everybody,

Till now I used to use my external hard drive as my secondary drive, with my internal being used for software and the external as storage. Today I got myself a 400gig internal HD and moved all my pictures into it, and now want to use that as my photo drive and use the external for backup. How do I re-locate where Lightroom sees my photographs?

Thanks!

Michael

[wcameron]

Open Lightroom and go to Edit Preferences. In the General tab there is an option under Default Catalog to "Prompt me when starting Lightroom". Save this and then restart. You'll get a prompting to open your main catalog and the entire path to the library will be shown.

You can now close LR and open Windows Explorer. Go to the location that was indicated for your primary library and make sure to copy the actual .lrdb file AND the Previews.lrdata folder. You can then open Lightroom and when the Select Catalog prompt comes up use the Choose button to navigate to the new location that you've copied the library to.

This is the easiest way. This will also get your library into a more logical location rather than hidden under many submenus on your C drive.

[MikeMike]

Thanks Cameron,

Is it the same thing for mac?

Michael

[wcameron]

Unfortunately I can't speak for a Mac, but I'm guessing that it works the same way.

Cheers
Ward

[Nat Coalson]

The procedure for this is essentially the same for Mac, although I've seen that LR on the Mac is much more savvy about automatically relinking "missing files" or ones that are in a new location.

But there's no reason that the catalog must be on the same drive as the photos. Keep in mind that in the LR catalog database the drive letter is part of the path to the file. So you need to make sure that when you've opened up the catalog in it's new location that it is not still pointing to the files on the old drive - it most likely will be. You can confirm this by selecting an image and using Show in Explorer (or whatever it's called in Windows LR).

To relink to the files on the new drive you will have to somehow "hide" the old files from LR (temporarily moving them to the trash seems to work) and then when all the folders turn red, relink the folders to the new location.

[MikeMike]

That works! thanks

[MikeMike]

Another question, is there an easy way to backup the entire catalog onto another HD?

[francois]

Another question, is there an easy way to backup the entire catalog onto another HD?
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You can use "File >Export as catalog…" and choose the appropriate options.