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Voxford
Voxford
Participant
May 15, 2022
Question

Moving LR photos from iMac to external hard drive

  • May 15, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 997 views

I apologize in advance for what are probably basic questions. I've managed to fill my iMac hard drive with the photos in my Lightroom Classic Catalog. There are so many -- 19,000 + -- that I can no longer back up the poor, overstressed Mac. How do I transfer all those current photos onto an external hard drive in such a way that I can still pull them up in LR, with their metadata?

 

Once I've done that, what is the recommended workflow going forward? Is there a way to transfer photos from a camera's SD card through the computer and onto an external drive and then edit the photos on the computer  using LR? 

 

Finally, any recommendations for external hard drives? I'm on a 2017 iMac with 16GB of memory and 251 GB of flash storage. It's running Big Sur, though Apple is wanting me to upgrade to Monterey.

 

Many thanks. 

 

BUT FIRST:

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

Rob_Cullen
Community Expert
Rob_CullenCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 15, 2022

The Lightroom Queen (Victoria Bampton) has a blog article on this topic-

MOVING PHOTOS- 2 Methods

In which-

Option 1 is the recommended method as advised by @TheDigitalDog . By far- the simplest.

OTOH- Option 2 can be preferred when moving a very large number (or an entire library of files). More 'work' , more 'understanding', but using a manual 'Copy' may be the "Belts and Braces" approach.

 

 

Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.1.1, Photoshop 27.3.1, ACR 18.1.1, Lightroom 9.0, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0.2 .
    TheDigitalDog
    TheDigitalDog
    Inspiring
    May 15, 2022

    Hook up the drive, hopefully, big and empty. 

    Ideally, move everything within Lightroom Classic. Then it 'knows' what you have done and updates that info in the catalog. LR can do virtually anything you can do in the Mac Finder: Move, Copy (if so desired in this case but probably not), Delete, Rename etc. When you do this outside LR, it doesn't know and you have to jump through some hoops to inform it what you did. IF you do it within LR, no issue. 

    Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"
      Voxford
      VoxfordAuthor
      Participant
      May 15, 2022

      Whoops. that BUT FIRST was extraneous. Nothing more is coming. Sorry.

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