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A
agt2014
Participant
November 7, 2019
Question

copy photos to a new external hard drive

  • November 7, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 1612 views

In need instructions on how to copy not move my photos from an existing external hard drive to a new external hard drive. I use Lightroom classic on a Mac OS.

 

I want to keep my existing photos on the exist external drive as back up. Then use the new external drive with the old photos going forward.

 

Would I copy and paste 11000 photographs from one drive to another by connecting both drives to the computer? Is this done outside of Lightroom? Will Lightroom recognize the new consolidated external drive? 

 

My existing drive is 1 TB and is almost full. The new drive is 5 TB.

 

Will the folder system stay the same inside Lightroom?

 

Thank you for any help!

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

A
agt2014Author
Participant
November 7, 2019

Thank you!

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 7, 2019

What you do is simply connect both hard drives. Make sure the destination harddrive is empty and formatted correctly as Mac OS extended or as APFS since you are on a Mac. Most external harddrives come formatted as ExFAT or NTFS nowadays which is not ideal for use with Macs so usually you have to reformat them which is done in Disk Utility. Make sure you just reformat the new drive. Then when you have everything prepared and both the old disk and the new one mounted, simply drag the top level folder or folders from older hard disk to the newer and they will get copied. This can take a while. Then when you are done with this unmount the old drive. Then in Lightroom Classic all you have to do to tell it about the new location is to look for a folder that was at the top level of the old hard drive and right (or control) click it and select update Folder location. Now simply point it to the location of this same folder on the new hard disk and Lightroom will connect all the files in that folder and its subfolders to the new location and will add the new drive to your system. You might need to do this for more than one folder if you have a number of them at the top level of your old drive. 

    A
    Audiotechnical
    Known Participant
    November 28, 2022

    This is exactly what I am looking to do now. In a similar way, I ran out of space on my LaCie drive, so I've bought another one, but 4x larger. I've formatted the new one, and actually called it a slightly different name (I have a naming convernsion with all my hard drives). I just attempted to drag one of the top level folders to the new drive, but it immediately comes up with a warning that I am about to 'Move' the folder, which I do not want to do. Appreciate this conversation is a few years old, so maybe now (LrC ver 12.0.1) could have changed? Any suggestions?

    J
    Community Expert
    Jao vdLCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 28, 2022

    Best to start a new thread for this but what you do is copy the folder in finder/explorer - not in Lightroom Classic and then in Lightroom Classic connect the folder to the new location. It is much more reliable to do it that way than to move it inside Lightroom. It is option 2 in this aricle: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/move-photos-another-hard-drive-leaving-catalog/

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