P: Working with multiple external drives (PC, WIn10)

My drives have always had printed labels, but now I'll just add a drive letter to the label as well. It's all pretty easy to manage one you know the rules of the game.

🙂

All of my removable drives have a physical label placed on the drive with the drive letter and assigned name for quick identification when reconnecting it.

I think I prefer a small green drive light "on" for each drive that's correcty mounted, even if it only displays the drive letter.

"As the drive location is mapped to an alias/shortcut in C:\CLIENT1 then, when the drive is removed, LrC displays them in a subfolder of DriveC which is always connected (or whatever non-removable drive/letter was used to hold the alias). At first glance it's not evident that it's a whole hard disk that's not connected vs simply missing files that have been moved to a new location"

Right, you have to expand the mount-point folder to see the missing folders underneath:

LR isn't aware of mount points (though it should be).

An interesting solution .. but it's not great (from what I'm seeing). As the drive location is mapped to an alias/shortcut in C:\CLIENT1 then, when the drive is removed, LrC displays them in a subfolder of DriveC which is always connected (or whatever non-removable drive/letter was used to hold the alias). At first glance it's not evident that it's a whole hard disk that's not connected vs simply missing files that have been moved to a new location

I'm going to stick with what I'm doing now which is simply creating a reference document on my desktop explaining which drive is which and I'm also using the disk letter as a keyword that I apply during import (ie: DiskJ, DiskK, DiskL, DiskM, DiskM, DiskO, DiskP, etc ...). That way I immediately know that there's a drive not connected, what the letter is, and filter using that keyword when I need to access the a mixed bag of files in a collection. As storage gets larger and cheaper I hope to consolidate some of these drives. But for now it's working fine.

R

Thank you very much for that, John! I won't have time to test it out before Wednesday but it looks like a great (perfect?) solution. - Russell

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Another option is to create "mount points" for each drive.  For example, suppose you have drives CLIENT1 and CLIENT2.  You could create mount points C:\CLIENT1 and C:\CLIENT2 for those drives, and refer to their contents using those paths, not the drive letters.  It would look like this in LR:

You can freely connect and disconnect the drives, and Windows remembers the mount point for each drive.  

You'd continue to also have drive letters assigned to the drives, so they're easy to find and eject in File Explorer.

Once you've created the mount point for an existing drive, you can tell LR to use that mount point rather than the drive letter for photos already in the catalog.  In the Folders panel, right-click one of the top-level folders for that drive letter and do Show Parent Folder. Keep doing that until you reach the top (which should be a folder with a drive letter for its name).  Right-click that top folder, do Update Folder Location, and select the new mount point for that drive.

You create mount points using the Computer Management app:

I'm well aware of everything you mention. LrC Folders panel is contained entirely in the catalog file with no direct connection to Windows File Explorer. Moving, renaming, or deleteing files, folders, or drives from outside of LrC will cause LrC to lose it's connection to those assets. For those like your self who choose to add a drive name using Window's Disk Management it shouldn't be that difficult for Adobe to add that information to the LrC catalog database. This of course is a Windows only "Idea" and it can be implemented that way as the issue does not exist for Mas systems. That is what you requested in your original post and I agree it is a shortcoming that Adobe could address. That's the reason I moved this post to the Ideas group.

"When I disconnect a drive Lightroom wants to reconnect the same drive to work on the imported images but provides me with only a drive letter and not a drive name which is how I identify the various clients external drives. Is that correct? Is there a preference I'm missing?"

(I do wonder why this thread was moved to "Ideas" when it's really a discussion about a problem, whatever...)

I think the problem is more complex than you think as drives on a PC are not required to have a Volume Label (it can even be left blank) as the system connects to storage media by ONLY referencing its letter (a-z). On the Mac the drives MUST have a Volume Name which is created when the drive is formatted and it will not change unless the drive is reformatted. So there's no need for a solution on a Mac as it reveals its volume name by default. Any solution from Adobe would have to be a "Windows only" feature and whatever method is used could easily be broken if the drive letter changes.

As another layer of protection I'll probably add something to the file metadata (perhaps a keyword) that will apply to all images imported from the same drive.

As external drives continue to grow larger and prices drops (once the supply chain issues are over...) then I might end up with only one massive drive (+ a duplicate mirrored) so only one drive would be connected to LR when accessing originals. Cloud storage is also becoming cheaper, safer and faster, though not safe or fast enough yet for me. So connecting external drives might soon go the way of the Floppy disk.

Russell

Adobe could add recording of both the drive letter and assigned name in the LrC catalog database. That shouldn't be difficult and would reolve the issue on Windows systems. I'm sure you're not the only one who has encountered this issue.  I'll bring it up at our meeting next Tuesday and along with the enability to reply after moving your post from Discussions to Ideas.