Moving files from lightroom to external hard drive

TamLee333 wrote: I have read a few post on this subject but I have not found the answers that I am looking for. I want to take all of the photos off of my computer and put them on an external hard drive.  If I am in lightroom and plug in my external hard drive, if i just move all the folders over to the external hard drive does take them off of my comptuer?  Also, what I want to do is make one folder for each calender year along with the edits made to the photos.  So, If I back up my catolog and move it over with the photos, that means that all of the edits I made on those photos will stay with those photos? With having all my photos off the computer, if I wanted to reopen a folder from my external hard drive through lightroom, will they will automatically open with all the edits still done to them?

Point 1: yes Lightroom will move them from your computer to the external. However I wouldn't recommend doing this, I would copy the files from the computer to the external using your OS and when you have verified the copy is ok and you have "Updated the folder location" in Lightroom then you can delete the folders from your computer.

Point 2: You can do this manually in Lightroom using the Sort options to achieve the older you want or craete a new catalog and import from your current one and at the import stage move the files to new folders with date order.

Point 3: yes it will but you will not be able to "work" the files that are on the offline drive unless you have generated Smart Previews.