Lightroom - Switching external hard drives without losing edit history

[angelad29489570]

I store all my photos on an external hard drive in one catalogue.  I would like to retire my older hard drive and switch to a new one.   I have backed up all the photos to the new drive.   If I just import the photos to lightroom using the new drive all the edit history is gone.   Could someone please direct me to an article or video explaining how to do this and keep the edit history?  Also, how often do most people retire external hard drives and switch to a new one to reduce risk of failure?    Apologies if this is a basic skill - fairly new to all this!

[Conrad_C]

What you’re asking for is reasonable and possible. The problem you ran into is that history steps and some other types of metadata, such as collections, smart collections, and slide shows, exist at the catalog level, so they’re not stored with any individual images. They’re in the catalog. Therefore, importing the same images to a new or different catalog does not bring any of that catalog-level metadata…it was left behind in the old catalog.

A lot of people have to move a Lightroom Classic setup from one computer to another, or one drive to another, so there is a “best practice” way to do it. After you copy the files to a new drive or computer, you open the same catalog you were using before, and tell it where the images moved to. You can do this by right-clicking* a topmost folder in the Folders panel, and choosing Update Folder Location. That will relink not only the images in that folder, but in all subfolders. And it will relink all images to their history states and other catalog-level metadata in that catalog, such as which collections they were in.

If you need step-by-step instructions for that, they’re in an article on the excellent Lightroom Queen website:

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/how-move-lightroom-to-new-computer/

*If right-click isn’t enabled on your Mac, Control-click the topmost parent folder instead.

[angelad29489570]

Thank you for this answer.  I have tried the steps on one individual test folder and it worked.  The lightroom queen site is great!   A couple of other questions: 

Once I've completed the transfer of the whole catalogue to the new external hard drive, should I then simply retire the old drive knowing that the edits won't be on the drive, but the photos will remain (both the originals and the edited versions) as a backup?   What is a good practice going forward regarding backing up photos regularly?   I'm thinking I should get a third drive and start backing up the RAW and edited photos to that - and then when I'm ready to switch to using the third drive for editing, the photos will be ready to be linked?   I don't have enough cloud storage to do it automatically.  Thank you for your help with this.

[dj_paige]

Re-importing photos is almost never a good thing to do, as you have found out.

Instructions for your move are here: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/move-photos-another-hard-drive-leaving-catalog/

[angelad29489570]

Thank you!!