Moving Photographs and Catalogue to New HD

[Jonathan316]

I have the Raw versons of my personal photographs on one portable external 5TB HD, backed up to a RAID and to the cloud. This drive is getting old and I'm thinking of moving it to a newer portable HD. If I move everything from the old HD to the new one, including the LR catalogue, will it function exactly like the old one or will it lose the groups that I have put the images into? Also, in order to be sure that all adjustments move with the images, should I do a command S on all images or is there is way to save adjustments which will take up less HD space?

[KR Seals · Accepted solution]

Please describe your system and operating system. Win or Mac?

1. Is you catalog on your internal drive now? If so, leave it there. Unless you have a very fast, foolproof  connection to the external drive, the internal drive will be much faster which makes Lightroom Classic faster.

2. Your photo image files should all be under one master "Photos" (or some similar name) directory/folder as subfolders. That file/folder organization should be done in Lightroom Classic, not the operating system. Otherwise, Lightroom Classic will never be able to find the images again without a painful amount of work.

3. When you copy the photo/image files to the new drive, keep the exact same folder structure. Then you point Lightroom Classic to the  master "Photos" folder on the new drive. (Right click on that master folder in Lightroom Classic and point it to the new folder on the new drive).

4. All of your adjustments and every other bit of information about the photos is contained in the catalog. That is why it is EXTREMELY important to backup the catalog every time you use Lightroom Classic. The catalog file (xxx.lrcat) is a specific file size on the drive and it will grow a little in size with each and every change you make in Lightroom Classic. There is no way to change the catalog file size without deleting photos which you may or may not be interested in doing. Doing a CTL+S to the images in Lightroom Classic creates an .XMP file that goes along with the image file. That XMP has all the information from the catalog about that specific image file. Not usually necessary as long as your catalog is properly backed up.

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[Jonathan316]

Thank you!

1) I'm on a Mac. Sonoma 14.6.1. The LR Classic Catalogue and backups are sitting on the External HD which is a G-Drive with a Thunderbolt connection. Should I move my catalogue to the internal HD on my MacBook Pro?

2) Not sure what you mean that my image files should all be under one master "Photos" folder. My photographs are organized by year and within each year, by 2 categories and then under that, by date / subject.

3) I don't have one Master Folder but multiple subfolders.

4) I'm not totally clear which parts of the LR Catalogue are being used. It looks like the ones I need are Helper.lrdata, Previews.lrdata, lrcat, lrcat-data. But when I unzip one of the backups, all I see are Ircat and Ircat-data.

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

2) Not sure what you mean that my image files should all be under one master "Photos" folder. My photographs are organized by year and within each year, by 2 categories and then under that, by date / subject.

3) I don't have one Master Folder but multiple subfolders.

Another word for this is a "Parent folder" that contains all the subfolders. That's what you move. As others have said, don't change anything inside the Parent folder. Just move it. Or better yet, copy it to the new drive.

If you then rename the new drive to be EXACTLY the same as the old drive's name, you're done, everything should work. (On Windows, you want the drive letter to be exactly the same as the previous drive's letter)

[AxelMatt · Accepted solution]

...

If I move everything from the old HD to the new one, including the LR catalogue, will it function exactly like the old one or will it lose the groups that I have put the images into?

...

By @Jonathan316

Copy all files and folders the 1:1 to the new hard drive. Keep the whole folder structure as it is. Don't change any thing!!!

After this connect the drive with the same driver letter (Windows) or same name (MacOS). I think external drive are connected via name to the system on a Mac. But I'm not really sure because I'm a Windows user.

When you open the catalog from the new drive alls should be as on the old one.

[Jonathan316]

Problem resolved. Worked perfectly. Thank you