Moving Dropbox with LR photos & catalogs to external drive

[roamingtroll]

My (nearly 4 yr old) laptop internal 1T drive is nearly full with 525G alone in photos, music & video.  All these have been accumulating in my Dropbox (in various folders) on my computer since 2010.  After purchasing my dslr camera in 2018 I started using Lightroom CC.  I continued to use Dropbox as the default photo storage to avoid loss of data and view photos on other devices.  I purchased an external drive to move my Dropbox to so I can keep my growing collection in one location.  Also the drive has been making some occasional burping noises when booting up.  Not good.  Dropbox instructs to move this main Dropbox folder from my internal to an external drive using their desktop app.  This means it is done outside of Lightroom.

I am not looking to move the programs such as LR and Premiere but just the working files, catalogs and backups.  Would there be any issues other than having to "find folders or find photos" that might result from moving everything outside of LR (behind Lightroom's back as some say)?

[ManiacJoe]

When moving large numbers of files, doing it outside of LR usually works best as LR is not a file browser. After you move the files using Mac Finder or Windows File Explorer, just go to LR Folder panel and do the "find missing folder" on the top-level folders that were moved.

While we are talking about external drives, make sure you have all the needed drives and/or cloud services for backing up your images and catalogs. Of big note, make sure your main catalog(s) and the matching catalog backups are NOT on the same drive.

[roamingtroll]

Question on your statement about the catalogs and backups not being on the same drive.  They have always been on the same internal drive since installing LR.  The Dropbox folder heirarchy (where they are both currently stored) would stay the same to the new external drive.  Are you saying I should keep the catalog/s on the laptop and backups on the external drive(which syncs with Dropbox in the cloud)?  

[ManiacJoe]

When the master catalog and its backups are on the same drive, a single drive failure takes both the catalog and the backups with it. Ideally, you want your catalog and its backups on two separate drives. For example, on my computer the catalog(s) are on the internal D drive, their backups on the internal E drive. Both internal drives are backed up to external drives. The some master image files are on the E drive; some are on an external P drive. Both are backed up to an external Q drive.

In your case, you are using DropBox as a cloud drive for your backups. This is a good thing.

If you do not need your catalog(s) to be shared between computers, I would put the master catalog on your computer (for better performance) and let LR store the ZIP backups on the external drive. If the ZIP backups also go to the Dropbox cloud, even better.

[roamingtroll]

Being a hobbyist with my photography and not using LR daily I had left the back up frequency at the once a week when I first installed LR.  I think that was my own reasoning on putting the catalogs on the external drive along with the backups.  In case the computer died between uses.  Since I changed the back up frequency to every time LR shuts down that negates that thought process.  I can leave the catalogs on the main drive.  Thanks for the help.  Now to start the transfer.  

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

You can move the photos by following the instructions in "Part 2 — Updating Folder Location" of this document: http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm