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Changing disk drive and reassign photos

Explorer ,
Sep 26, 2022 Sep 26, 2022

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Hi all,

I am one of the guys that has been searching for help because of the topic "Changing Disk Drive and reassigning photos". If I understood it correctly, there is no way of reassigning the location of my photos to a new drive.

I do have nearly 200,000 photos in a catalogue, all with manually given hashtags, but they are distributed in a lot of different folders. I am sure this is nothing special: I am working as freelancer, so I do have a lot of files that I (unfortunatly) can not manage all with lightroom. Sorting all photos out of the context (client folders or links for indesign for example) into a new folder is not an option. I do have to move to a new harddisk, because I do need more space.

I moved everything to a new external harddisk and - I am stuck, because it is not possible to reassign the drive within lightroom. I do not want to change the name of the new volume to the old one (because I do have organized harddisks). This should be fixed, and honestly: it should not be difficult to implement that - very often asked - feature.

 

Please: make it possible to search for missing folders (+subfolders) within the drive! (and not only folders + subfolders).

 

Best, Albert

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Community Expert ,
Sep 26, 2022 Sep 26, 2022

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If I'm understanding this correctly, Lightroom is showing the files you've moved to the new hard drive as missing?  

 

I assume you've tried to locate the missing folders by Right Click > Locate Missing Folders?  I've always found this to work when I've rearranged folders in the OS.

 

If I've misunderstood the situation, feel free to clarify!

 


George F, Fine Art Landscape Photographer

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Community Expert ,
Sep 26, 2022 Sep 26, 2022

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And if you haven't tried locating the missing folders, it's as easy as going to the library module, finding the root folder for your photos, and then right clicking on that folder and selecting locate missing folders. You should be able to navigate from there to the new location of the photos.

 

Again, feel free to clarify if your situation is different from this.


George F, Fine Art Landscape Photographer

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Explorer ,
Sep 27, 2022 Sep 27, 2022

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Thanks a lot George: I was missing the possibility to reconnect to a new drive by going to parent folder (to highest parent which is the drive) and then reconnect to the new drive. I missed this solution, because the parentfolders are not shown.
It still would be smart in terms of thinking about UI, that you are able in LrC to rightclick on the drive and to reconnect it.

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Community Expert ,
Sep 26, 2022 Sep 26, 2022

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If you need to move files to a different storage volume, where they will get a different full path, it will not be possible to retain e.g. those current links into InDesign unaffected. Only if you can substitute the exact same drive referencing, will those links still lead to the same data. Taking the situation where all your folders and files are bodily moved to a different larger storage volume outside of LrC, but where the Catalog still refers to them at the prior location (so they are now 'not found'): if you can then switch the drive referencing over from outside of LrC, the Catalog will continue none the wiser - as if nothing had changed. If OTOH only some folders and files are being moved to the different storage volume then clearly two identical names cannot coexist: one set or the other set must appear under a differently named drive. Alternatively only fresh data might go onto the new drive volume, and all your existing data might stay where it is. That is the least impact. LrC is perfectly happy to span its image library across multiple drives at the same time: e.g. Collections and keyword searches simply don't care about that aspect. You'd just need to find some useable and logical-seeming division so far as your own navigation of the library in terms of the Folders panel. For example, a known date cutoff.

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Explorer ,
Sep 27, 2022 Sep 27, 2022

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Hi Richard, thanks a lot for your rich answer and the explanation! Good points!

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Community Expert ,
Sep 26, 2022 Sep 26, 2022

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In the future, if you outgrow a disk, you can simply add another one rather than migrate files from one disk to a new, larger one. In my experience, it's the least risky way to add capacity. I'm curious why you believe that you can't manage all files within Lightroom. I have a mixture of client work and personal images and can easily navigate between them with the effective use of keywords.

Jill C., Forum Volunteer

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Explorer ,
Sep 27, 2022 Sep 27, 2022

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Thanks for your reply. Your solution doesn't fit for me: I want (and need) all my data on one harddisk, because I do not want to play dj by conecting the required harddisk (starting from 2000 I actually would have lots of ;-). I see the point that it is the least risky way to expand memory.

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Community Expert ,
Sep 26, 2022 Sep 26, 2022

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quote

Hi all,

I am one of the guys that has been searching for help because of the topic "Changing Disk Drive and reassigning photos". If I understood it correctly, there is no way of reassigning the location of my photos to a new drive.


By @albertg90748622

 

You misunderstood. Lightroom Classic uses a simple path to the images, that includes your drive letter (Windows) or disk name (Macintosh). That means that assigning to a new drive is actually quite easy. Copy all the image folders to the new drive, disconnect the old drive and assign the same drive letter to the new drive that the old drive had (Windows), or give the new disk the same name as the old disk had (Macintosh). Then start Lightroom and it will recognize the new drive as if it was the old one.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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Explorer ,
Sep 27, 2022 Sep 27, 2022

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I do not want to replicate a new drive with the same name or letter. I want to reconnect it to new one.

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Community Expert ,
Sep 27, 2022 Sep 27, 2022

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@albertg90748622 wrote:

I do not want to replicate a new drive with the same name or letter. I want to reconnect it to new one.


 

That is what you are effectively doing! After you've done this, you can use the old drive for other things. Just give it another drive letter or disk name.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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Explorer ,
Sep 27, 2022 Sep 27, 2022

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To be more clear: I do not want a workaround that has disadvantages imho.
Maybe we are misunderstanding each other? I copied all my data onto a new drive with a different letter/and then needed to find a reasonable way to reconnect it. I did not knew that reconnecting the drive is possible without using same name or letter! The solution is to show parentfolder until you are on drive-level, then reconnect.

 

My featurerequest to Adobe is: make it able to reconnect the drive by rightclicking on it in the folders-section. That is actually not possible and led me to a 1 hour searching for a solution and occupy others in the community (thanks for helping). Adobe could (and should) avoid this in general. This topic of reconnecting is found all around here: most common answer is to use same letter an drivename resulting of an "optimizable" UI.

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Explorer ,
Sep 27, 2022 Sep 27, 2022

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For information: It is possible to go to drivelevel in the folders-section by (multiple use of) "show parentfolder", but it works not for me to reconnect it! It seems that it has to be a folder that is reconnected (this works for me). Reconnecting drivelevel had no effect when I tried it.

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Community Expert ,
Sep 27, 2022 Sep 27, 2022

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@albertg90748622 wrote:

For information: It is possible to go to drivelevel in the folders-section by (multiple use of) "show parentfolder", but it works not for me to reconnect it! It seems that it has to be a folder that is reconnected (this works for me). Reconnecting drivelevel had no effect when I tried it.


 

I could have told you that. A drive is not a folder, so the folder path you would create in this situation does not correspond with a correct path to the drive. The best approach is to always store your images in a folder hierarchy that starts with a single parent folder, then you won't have all these problems and changing to a new drive will be just a few mouse clicks.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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