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greadore
Participant
March 19, 2018
Question

Lightroom Not recognizing change in External Hard Drives

  • March 19, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 1493 views

I have a question that I hope someone can help me with.  I use Lightroom and was saving all my photos in folders on my laptop internal hard drive but was running out of space.  I have two external hard drives that are recognized as Drive "D" and Drive "E" by my operating system and wanted to use those to save all my photos on so I can have two backup sources.

I first successfully loaded/transferred all the photos onto the first external Drive "D" and could access everything with no problem.  I could open the folders and individual picture files and go into the development module and find/see them.  Drive "D" was listed in the Lightroom Folders Window on the left side of the screen as the drive that was plugged into the laptop.  I then did the same with the second external Drive "E" and everything worked fine as well and the Folders Window showed Drive "E" as the drive that was plugged into the lap top.  I then removed Drive "E" and closed the lightroom program and shut down the computer for the night. 

The problem now is that when I went back to work in Lightroom and opened the program and plugged in Drive "D" , Drive "E" still shows up in the folders window on the left and NOT Drive "D".  So Lightroom is now/still looking for my photos in Drive "E" which is not the drive that is plugged in.  I thought once I had set up Drive "D" (as well as Drive "E") Lightroom would detect each individual external drive when it is plugged in (just like the lap top OS does) but it only seems to recognize or identify the last external drive letter name that was plugged in.  This is a hassle.  How do I get Lightroom to recognize Drive "D"?  Do I have to do this every time I change to a different external drive and have to manually get Lightroom to recognize it?

Thanks!

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    March 19, 2018

    Are drive D and drive E identical, meaning they have the exact same photos in the exact same folder structure? If so, then use only one. Don't keep switching back and forth. Make your life simple.

    But, yes, each time you would switch to a different drive, you will have to tell LR to use the different drive. There is no way to avoid this. Again, make your life simple, use only one of the drives, let the other one be the backup, sitting untouched and unused, except in the case of emergency where some of your non-backup photos are not usable. This is a far better practice, by the way, than sometimes using Drive D and sometimes using Drive E.

    How do I get Lightroom to recognize Drive "D"?

    Follow the instructions here, in particular Figure 4 and associated text.

    Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders

    G
    greadoreAuthor
    Participant
    March 20, 2018

    Thank you for the reply.  Yes, the drives are identical in the fact that the picture photos are identical.  I understand your point about just using one drive and not switching back and forth and will do that, but since I do not have the photos on my computer internal drive anymore (due to lack of space) the whole idea of using the two drives was to have backup redundancy should one of the external drives go down.  If the one drive fails I won't have a backup with all the updated files, so at some point I will need to backup the second drive anyway.  I followed the instructions and was able to get Lightroom to switch over and recognize Drive D again.

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    March 20, 2018

    You need to use some automated backup software, that will copy everything on drive D to drive E at some regular basis (I make backups every night). Anything else is not a good backup strategy in my opinion — if the backup strategy depends on a human remembering to do this backup at some fixed interval, that's simply not a good strategy because everyone forgets or doesn't have the time or whatever.

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