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Question

Lightroom Library on External Drive

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
August 5, 2021
3 replies
237 views

Sorry for the noob question.

I did searches and was getting different answers.

Im working with a MSI workstation laptop and have limited onboard space (512GB).

I have a 5TB external drive that has all my photos and videos.

I want to use LR with this external drive.

I want to add all photos (about 75K) to LR so I can organize, search, edit, etc but it keeps wanting me to add the photos to the laptop drive and its quite obvious that I cant because of space.

Am I just overlooking something obvious or am I hitting a limitation?

I mainly need to organize my photos via name/date and/or Exif data then go to edit them.

Or should I look at another program to get organized with?

Thanks

{Moved from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom ecospace by moderator}

Windows

This topic has been closed for replies.

GoldingD

Legend

P.S.

Keep good backups of your catalog, preferably to multiple drives, defiantly not on the same drive as the catalog resides on.

Keep good backups of your photos. They are not in the catalog. Backing up the catalog does not back up the photos

No reason to backup Library Prwviews , LrC will recreate them if need be.

Keep copys of any presets, add-ins you acquire, they are not in the catalog..

GoldingD

Legend

/EDIT/THE FOLLOWIN DOES NOT APPLY TO Lr v4.3/

Second off, assuming Lightroom Classic (LrC)

Lightroom Classic, runs on your computer, it uses a database called a catalog kept on your computer. It uses photos normally stored on your computer, but they can be anywhere..

As to what hard drives or other storage media you can use:

The catalog resides on a hard drive, any hard drive, best performance if on your quickest hard drive. The hard drive should have at least 20% free space including the catalog and library presets. The catalog cannot be kept on NAS, oh some have limited success, but not worth it.
Library previews will be on the same drive and under the same parent folder as the catalog. Very difficult to change, not worth the effort to change. These previews can eat up space.
The Camera RAW CACHE folder can be on any drive, performance can be improved if it is on your fastest drive. If on a Windows computer, performance can take a hit if it is on the same drive as the paging file, esoecially during lots of develop edits during a long LrC sesson.
The program is typically on the root drive as most programs are. It is not very useful to modify that
The photos can be on any hard drive. They are only occasionally accessed by LrC. Users often place them on an external drive, some even place them on a NAS. a few on Internet shares.

GoldingD

Legend

First off, that program name, Lightroom. Can be confusing thanks to Adobe Marketing.

What exact program do you have

Lightroom v6.14 or older, a.k.a Lightroom Perpetual, no longer sold or supported by Adobe
Lightroom Classic (LrC), currently v10.3
Lightroom (Lr) , the cloudy vetsion, a.k.a Lightroom Desktop, nickname Lightroom Cloudy, current version 4.3

B

BlazianAzianAuthor

Participant

Hi GoldingD,

I have the cloud version. 4.3

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

You can't place the library anywhere else. It is hardwired to be in your Pictures folder on the internal drive. You can specify a different location for copies of the originals however. Lightroom also uses this location for temporary copies during import, so it is useful to change this location even if you do not ask Lightroom to save a local copy of the originals.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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