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wheretowill
Participant
August 23, 2021
Question

Moving Lightroom Catalog to New Hard Drive

  • August 23, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 35813 views

Good morning!

 

I've recently purchased a new hard drive to store everything Lightroom and Photoshop related as my original hard drives are full and have pictures all over the place.

 

So my question is what is the best way to move everything over to my new hard drive? Is it as simple as dragging and dropping the folders on the left sidebar inside of Lightroom Classic? I currently have about 64,000 pictures in my catalog with about 18,000 of those synced to the Cloud. On my desktop computer these pictures are split among probably 4 different harddrives, and I think some of my originals (RAW files) are only found in the Cloud. 

 

How can I safely and confidently transfer EVERY image over so that I can basically start fresh and have everything in the same spot? I am really nervous about doing this as I don't want to lose any of these memories!

 

I'm sure it's an easy process and I'm just overthinking things!

2 replies

D
dj_paige
Legend
August 23, 2021

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

 

You can move the catalog file itself using your operating system (but its better to leave the catalog file on your fastest disk, which is usually the internal disk of your comptuer)

    JP Hess
    JP Hess
    Inspiring
    August 23, 2021

    The simplest way to do it is to drag/drop folders in the library module in the left-hand column. Just drag the folders to the new hard drive. Be sure to do it using the Lightroom library module, don't do it with just your system browser (Finder or File Explorer). If you try to do it using your system browser then Lightroom will not keep track of where the images get relocated to. I would leave your catalog and other Lightroom system folders on the internal hard drive where they are located now.

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