How to manage photo collection split across multiple external hard drives

[JEK99]

I am currently storing my photos and Lightroom catalog on an external hard drive.  Of course, the day will come when I fill up that hard drive and will need to start putting further photos on a second external hard drive.  Can someone talk me through how that works?  Do you still have one catalog - perhaps moved to the C drive on the computer itself - and you can open photos on whichever of the hard drives is plugged in or else get an error message if a drive is not plugged in?  On the second external hard drive, do you plug it into a different port, so that it has a different drive name, so that you could plug in two external hard drives at once if you want to? 

Any tips from experience on how to decide which photos go on which drive?  I could put the new ones on the new drive, so that the location depends on the date of the photo (e.g., grouped into subject matter folders, then subfolders by date), or I could rearrange things so that certain subject matter folders are on one drive and other subject matter folders on the other regardless of date.

[Conrad_C]

This should not be a problem. The catalog and the images can be stored on any internal or external storage. (The catalog cannot be on a networked file server, but images can be.)

The catalog can track images on multiple volumes. Each volume will be listed as a top level entry in the Folders panel, so if you have images stored on the computer and on two external hard drives, in the Folder panel you'll see a list of those three storage drives which you can expand to see the folders inside them that contain images you've cataloged.

One thing to look out for: If Windows switches the drive letters around on you, Lightroom can get confused as to which drive is which. There is a way to have Windows permanently assign a drive letter to a drive, which solves this problem. You'll have to find the steps to do that by searching, because I've never had to do it (I use a Mac which doesn't use drive letters).

As for organization, I do it by date because it's unambiguous and clear. The problem with organizing by subject matter is that some photos could be filed more than one way, but the computer file system only lets the live in one place. If you love birds, so you have photos of birds in 7 countries that you visited with your family, do they go in folders by bird, into folders by country, or in the Family folder?

Instead, many Lightroom users organize by date, and to locate photos by subject matter they use the Library module to enter keywords and other metadata fields. That's what I do, because then it's easy to use filters to show the photos grouped any way you want (by bird, by country, by family member, by date...).

[JEK99]

Thanks for this explanation, which is very clear and helpful.  I didn't get into all the details of my folders in my original post.  I live in New York and travel a lot, so my three big folders are New York (then subfolders by date), United States (then subfolders by US state, then sub-subfolders by date) and World (then subfolders by country, then sub-subfolders by date).  So this structure avoids the problems with multiple classifications that you describe.   If I were splitting by subject across external hard drives, it would likely be New York and United States on one external hard drive and World on another, and keeping the same subfolder and sub-subfolder structure.  One disadvantage of splitting this way is that when working on recent photos, I would need to access a different disk depending on where I took the photo.  But the advantage of doing it this way is that it's easy to remember which disk a particular photo is on.  

[Conrad_C]

JEK99 said "One disadvantage of splitting this way is that when working on recent photos, I would need to access a different disk depending on where I took the photo.  But the advantage of doing it this way is that it's easy to remember which disk a particular photo is on."

That doesn't have to be a disadvantage. A nice thing about Lightroom Classic is that you never have to remember where you put a photo, it can always tell you. It doesn't matter what form of organization you choose or where an image is stored — if you can see the photo in Lightroom Classic, right-click it and choose Show in Explorer (or Show in Finder on Macs), and Lightroom will switch to your desktop and pop open the folder window containing the file, with the file selected.

So organize them in whatever way works best for you, and when you need to get at the original file, just ask Lightroom where it is and it'll show you.

[JEK99]

To clarify, I was thinking in terms of not necessarily having both external hard drives plugged in all the time.  As I am much more likely to be working on more recent photos than older ones, this is less likely to be an issue if I split content chronologically across external hard drives than if I split by subject.

[Ian Lyons]

>  Do you still have one catalog - perhaps moved to the C drive on the computer itself

You can have as many catalogs as you like but only one can be open at a time. That being said, one catalog is much easier to manage. As to the location of the catalog. Ideally, it should be placed on your fastest drive (SSD is best).

Your photos can be split across multiple internal/external drives but this can make them more difficult to manage. Personally, I recommend getting the biggest and fastest (not essential) hard drive you can afford and place all your photos on same. You can then use below linked tutorial as a guide to how the photos can be easily and safely moved to the larger drive whilst still retaining full access to same.

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

[JEK99]

Thanks very much for this.  I bought the biggest portable external hard drive I could find at the time (4TB).  It needs to be portable, as I carry it with me on trips.  So my issue arises not because I started with a small external hard drive, but because with all my RAW files, I will eventually fill it up.  Thanks for the link to the article.  I quickly skimmed it and it looks very helpful indeed, as I will likely be moving files around at some point.  While new photos go on my external hard drive and I edit them on my laptop, I have another catalog and other photos on my desktop, so may well want to move them to their own external hard drive to improve my desktop's performance.