Skip to main content
M
musicbydavidrosen
Participating Frequently
December 8, 2025
Answered

Moving a lot of folders to new drive

  • December 8, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 198 views

I currently have 100s of folders of photos from different shoots that were initially on my internal drive but then moved to my multiple external drives, and I had to update the location in Lightroom every time I wanted access to one of them. Well now I may for the sake of better organization, buy one big external drive to put all of those folders in but I realized that's going to re break the locations in Lightroom and I'll have to do that for all of them again. Is there any way around this? The one thing I have going for me is for example my H: has a folder Pictures, then under that say 2015, 2016, 2017 etc until that drive is done. I: has Pictures then under that is 2018, 2019 etc. you got the idea.

 

So if on this new big one I use the same structure of Pictures and under it is every year, could I just locate the Pictures folder to fix ALL of them at once? And if I do that will Lightroom crawl to a halt trying to process reconnecting 10s of 1000s of photos? Am I overthinking that?

 

Thanks 

Correct answer dj_paige

You can move the folders inside the LrC Library Module and then there is no re-connecting. This is not advised because over the years, people occasionally run into a nasty catastrophic bug where photos disappear, and can't be found in the operating system — photos are gone, disappeared, lost. So I recommend you do the move in your operating system, and then reconnect.

 

If you move some of the folders but not others, then you can't reconnect all folders at once. You may be able to select in LrC just the moved folders and reconnect all of the moved folders at once, I don't know if this works, because I have never done this.

 

A better approach, if possible, is to not put the photos on your internal drive to begin with, put them on the desired external drive at Import, and then the move and the reconnecting is not necessary. If this is a laptop that you take with you without the external drives, then this is not possible.

1 reply

dj_paige
dj_paigeCorrect answer
Legend
December 8, 2025

You can move the folders inside the LrC Library Module and then there is no re-connecting. This is not advised because over the years, people occasionally run into a nasty catastrophic bug where photos disappear, and can't be found in the operating system — photos are gone, disappeared, lost. So I recommend you do the move in your operating system, and then reconnect.

 

If you move some of the folders but not others, then you can't reconnect all folders at once. You may be able to select in LrC just the moved folders and reconnect all of the moved folders at once, I don't know if this works, because I have never done this.

 

A better approach, if possible, is to not put the photos on your internal drive to begin with, put them on the desired external drive at Import, and then the move and the reconnecting is not necessary. If this is a laptop that you take with you without the external drives, then this is not possible.

M
musicbydavidrosenAuthor
Participating Frequently
December 8, 2025

Thanks for your quick response. The second paragraph is the one that I'm most interested in although as you said you've never actually tried that so I wonder if someone else might chime in. Unfortunately we're not talking about a new approach, as we're talking about the last 10 years of photos that need to be moved. and yes it sounds like moving within Lightroom could potentially be a mess and not worth trying. I'm really hopeful for a find top folder and all subfolders kind of function

dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
December 8, 2025
quote

I'm really hopeful for a find top folder and all subfolders kind of function


By @musicbydavidrosen

 

Yes, that exists, reconnect the parent folder and all subfolders get reconnected. But I don't think it exists if some of the subfolders have been moved and some have not been moved, which is the situation I thought (perhaps mistakenly) you were talking about.

Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices