Migrating my Photography Suite from a late '15 imac 5K to a new Mac Studio

Question

I'm quite nervous about this---I have about 35000 images in my LR Classic catalog, that I've worked with for years on my dear old iMac. The images themselves, though, are on a couple of 2TB drives in a two-tray box from Mac Gurus, and I hope to keep them right where they are. These drives have been connected via Firewire 800 to the iMac, using a Thunderbolt 2 to FW800 adapter. I'm about to update the drive box from FW to USB 3.1, for faster data movement when connected to the Mac Studio. When I got the Studio, I used Migration Assistant to bring all my files and folders from the iMac to the Studio, but I continued to use the iMac just for Lightroom work because its screen was better than what I had for the Studio. I've just acquired a Studio Display as well, so I'm ready to start using LR on the Studio at last.

When I started LR on the new Studio, Adobe apparently copied my existing library to it, via the Cloud, I assume---nice! I didn't realize that would happen. Since I have always kept my photos on the exterior drive box, will LR be able to find them there when I connect the box to the Studio? Can it be that simple? Experience tells me....naaah. Can anyone reassure me, or tell me how to avoid a long hassle with this transition? Thanks in advance!

Conrad_C · Accepted Answer

Since I have always kept my photos on the exterior drive box, will LR be able to find them there when I connect the box to the Studio? Can it be that simple? Experience tells me....naaah. Can anyone reassure me, or tell me how to avoid a long hassle with this transition?
By @jbarber1

It might work OK right away, and if it doesn’t, it should be easy to fix.

A Lightroom Classic catalog links to images the same way as a web page, page layout document, or video editing project: It tracks the files by remembering the path to each file’s volume and folder. When you open the Lightroom Classic catalog, it will look for the images at the last location recorded in the catalog which should be on your external volume.

If you’re lucky, if the external volume is connected when you open the catalog, the catalog will think “The images in this catalog are on an external volume of a certain name, and I see that it’s mounted, I‘ll just reconnect to all the images” and you can just keep working.

Hopefully this next thing isn’t going to happen, but if for some reason the catalog shows all of the folders/images as missing (question mark icons) when you open the catalog on the Mac Studio, you’ll have to re-link the top level folders on that volume. If all of the images are within a single parent folder, you can manually reconnect just that folder, and Lightroom Classic will automatically reconnect all subfolders. If you have to do this, right-click the folder, choose Find Missing Folder, and select that folder on the external volume. (If right-click isn’t enabled on your Mac, Control-click the folder to see that menu.) But hopefully it will just work.

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