Changing disk drive and reassign photos

For information: It is possible to go to drivelevel in the folders-section by (multiple use of) "show parentfolder", but it works not for me to reconnect it! It seems that it has to be a folder that is reconnected (this works for me). Reconnecting drivelevel had no effect when I tried it.

Hi all,

I am one of the guys that has been searching for help because of the topic "Changing Disk Drive and reassigning photos". If I understood it correctly, there is no way of reassigning the location of my photos to a new drive.

By @albertg90748622

You misunderstood. Lightroom Classic uses a simple path to the images, that includes your drive letter (Windows) or disk name (Macintosh). That means that assigning to a new drive is actually quite easy. Copy all the image folders to the new drive, disconnect the old drive and assign the same drive letter to the new drive that the old drive had (Windows), or give the new disk the same name as the old disk had (Macintosh). Then start Lightroom and it will recognize the new drive as if it was the old one.

In the future, if you outgrow a disk, you can simply add another one rather than migrate files from one disk to a new, larger one. In my experience, it's the least risky way to add capacity. I'm curious why you believe that you can't manage all files within Lightroom. I have a mixture of client work and personal images and can easily navigate between them with the effective use of keywords.

If you need to move files to a different storage volume, where they will get a different full path, it will not be possible to retain e.g. those current links into InDesign unaffected. Only if you can substitute the exact same drive referencing, will those links still lead to the same data. Taking the situation where all your folders and files are bodily moved to a different larger storage volume outside of LrC, but where the Catalog still refers to them at the prior location (so they are now 'not found'): if you can then switch the drive referencing over from outside of LrC, the Catalog will continue none the wiser - as if nothing had changed. If OTOH only some folders and files are being moved to the different storage volume then clearly two identical names cannot coexist: one set or the other set must appear under a differently named drive. Alternatively only fresh data might go onto the new drive volume, and all your existing data might stay where it is. That is the least impact. LrC is perfectly happy to span its image library across multiple drives at the same time: e.g. Collections and keyword searches simply don't care about that aspect. You'd just need to find some useable and logical-seeming division so far as your own navigation of the library in terms of the Folders panel. For example, a known date cutoff.

And if you haven't tried locating the missing folders, it's as easy as going to the library module, finding the root folder for your photos, and then right clicking on that folder and selecting locate missing folders. You should be able to navigate from there to the new location of the photos.

Again, feel free to clarify if your situation is different from this.

If I'm understanding this correctly, Lightroom is showing the files you've moved to the new hard drive as missing?  

I assume you've tried to locate the missing folders by Right Click > Locate Missing Folders?  I've always found this to work when I've rearranged folders in the OS.

If I've misunderstood the situation, feel free to clarify!