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A
AceCoolie
Participant
December 5, 2018
Answered

Importing photos without running out of space

  • December 5, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 4445 views

I've got a 500GB hard drive on my laptop (Surface book 2) with about 185GB free.  I've got a 1TB external drive with all of my images with about 280GB free.  I'm new to Lightroom CC and I want to import all of my pictures into Lightroom and upload them to the Adobe cloud (I have 1TB of cloud space).  I want my collection in the cloud and only a subset of pictures that I'm actively working on local on my laptop.

With the default install with Lightroom CC using 25% of the free space of my laptop, I tried to import from the root directory on my external drive which contains 42k pictures using 612GB.  I get an error that I don't have enough space.  Next, I tried changing the local storage option in Lightroom CC to specify the F drive for the location of the original files and tried to import again but I still get an error that the external drive doesn't have enough space.

How do I import all of the images on my hard drive without having to create a copy of them in the process?  I keep reading that Lightroom CC intelligently manages photos so you have access to your full collection and it downloads images on demand but I can't seem to get my collection into Lightroom CC. 

I didn't have this problem with Lightroom Classic but I want to leverage the cloud abilities of Lightroom CC.

Thanks!

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer bernardg72530219

Not sure if this method would work, but you could try to import in smaller segments instead of the entire 1TB in one go. From experimentation, it seems that Lightroom CC has a weird of managing the import and exports where it requires some sort of a temp cache equivalent to the import/export size. I had the same issue in wanting the export large segments of Raw files from the cloud to my external drive. My internal drive did not have sufficient space. Only way was to break down to smaller chunks or to have a large enough internal storage where the program sits.

Please do report if this works, i'm curious too..

1 reply

bernardg72530219
bernardg72530219Correct answer
Inspiring
December 6, 2018

Not sure if this method would work, but you could try to import in smaller segments instead of the entire 1TB in one go. From experimentation, it seems that Lightroom CC has a weird of managing the import and exports where it requires some sort of a temp cache equivalent to the import/export size. I had the same issue in wanting the export large segments of Raw files from the cloud to my external drive. My internal drive did not have sufficient space. Only way was to break down to smaller chunks or to have a large enough internal storage where the program sits.

Please do report if this works, i'm curious too..

A
AceCoolieAuthor
Participant
December 6, 2018

It looks like your solution worked.  I've been importing in smaller chunks and the external drive has filled up.  Once it had only 5GB free, I started seeing the message "Checking free space on disk" and then the import would continue.  Thanks!

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