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I am using Bridge 13. My cache \ database is on the OS SSD (C:). But all my photos are on a hard drive (D:). The HD is at 90-100% when indexing, so I want to speed things up by moving the photos to an SSD (E:). I believe that labels, rating etc. are in metadata and will not be affected. But is there a shortcut or way to avoid having to recreate all my collections?
Sean
Yes, you didn't mention Smart Collections initially but I see that you have discovered that they need to be edited if you move files onto a different drive because they are just saved searches and therefore include the source location. As you say quite easily done though. Unless somebody else chips in to prove me wrong, I don't think that there is any way to avoid this issue.
Good luck.
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Sounds like you are using a Windows PC.
If you move your photos using Bridge rather than the Windows operating system (File Explorer) you shouldn't lose anything including labels, ratings etc and collections should remain intact.
Try experimenting with a small subset of your pictures to convince yourself first - copy say 20 pictures to a new folder, label and rate them, create a collection containing half of them. Now move the folder to your new drive and check that all things are preserved.
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Thank you for responding. Yes, I am on Windows (10). I tried moving a selection of images to another drive, in Bridge, and a regular (not-smart) collection was preserved - That's good. However, a "Smart" collection was not preserved and I had to re-point to the new root of the collection to rebuild it. But that takes just a minute, and my collections are constantly reindexing anyway (by choice). Metadata, including ratings, labels, etc. was preserved in both instances, as expected (some of the media has been migrated multiple times over the years).
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Yes, you didn't mention Smart Collections initially but I see that you have discovered that they need to be edited if you move files onto a different drive because they are just saved searches and therefore include the source location. As you say quite easily done though. Unless somebody else chips in to prove me wrong, I don't think that there is any way to avoid this issue.
Good luck.