Moving catalogs from one hard drive/catalog to another.

[Tom_brown3]

Hi all! I was wondering if one of you could help me out. I recently took a job as a full-time photographer. I bought two new hard drives strictly for images I take for work. So when I want to edit work photos or download a memory card of photos I took that day at work, I plug that hard drive in. What I want to work on my personal stuff, I plug in my personal drive.

Here's my question, I have a bunch of photos on my personal hard drive that I would like to move to the new hard drive that I use for work. What is the safest, best way to do this? I really appreciate any help you can provide.

[Rob_Cullen]

Read all the advice in these two links-

MOVING PHOTOS- 2 Methods

MOVE or RENAME a CATALOG

You will need to decide if you want separate Catalogs for Work and Personal.

It sounds like you would want-

Work Photos + Work Catalog -on Disk-A

Personal Photos + Personal Catalog -on Disk-B

OR- One 'Master' catalog in your computer can reference both external drives with access to both Work & Personal photos when plugged in to computer - only the photo files are kept separate.

[JohanElzenga]

Are you using two different catalogs too? In that case you do not only want to move the photos to the other drive, you also want to move them to the other catalog. The easiest way to do that is as follows. In the personal catalog, select the photos and export them 'as original'. That will export the photos with their edits. If they are raw files the edits will be in a separate .xmp sidecar file, if they are tiff/jpeg then the edits are in the metadata header of the file. Move the exported files to the work drive and then import them in the work catalog.

[Tom_brown3]

Should I have both drives plugged in, or move the photos to a folder on my desktop, then plug in my work drive and import it?

[dj_paige]

There is no step of importing of existing photos that are already in your Lightroom Classic catalog in  the process of moving photos to a new folder or new disk. DO NOT IMPORT. DO NOT IMPORT. DO NOT IMPORT.

If you need to move photos, the instructions are here: https://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

But its still not clear what end result you want from these considerations. I believe this was all spelled out earlier by @Rob_Cullen who asked if you want:

Work Photos + Work Catalog -on Disk-A

Personal Photos + Personal Catalog -on Disk-B

OR- One 'Master' catalog in your computer can reference both external drives with access to both Work & Personal photos when plugged in to computer - only the photo files are kept separate.