Multiple hard drives and catalogs

Question

I recently added a new external hard drive for my photos beginning with 2025, since my original hard drive is almost full (it has images through 2024). I have connected the new hard drive to Lightroom and have been able to work on new images taken in 2025. When I connected the old hard drive to work on some 2024 images, Lightroom did not show them (only the 2025 catalog thumbnails since the 2025 hard drive is disconnected). How do I get Lightroom to show my photos from the old hard drive? The images are on the drive so it appears the catalog isn't connected, although the catalog for the old hard drive is backed up on my computer. I also noticed when I first connected the new hard drive to Lightroom that LRC seems to have updated. For example, my keywords from pre-2025 do not show up. My goal is to be able to use both hard drives and be able to work on images in Lightroom from whichever drive is connected. Thank you.

Conrad_C · Answer

If done correctly:All images from all volumes can be in a single catalog. If that is done, then all images are always listed, even if a volume is not mounted.If a volume is not mounted, the catalog will list the images but mark them missing and not let you edit them in the Develop module, but as soon as you mount the volume, they will become active and you can edit them.  Below is how that looks on my Mac: My main Lightroom Classic catalog is managing photos stored on four separate volumes. One is the internal storage of this laptop, and the other three are external. The volumes with the green markers on the left are mounted and available. The third one is marked gray because it isn’t currently mounted, but if I want to work with those images I only need to connect the volume.   If your 2024 and 2025 images are currently in different catalogs, that will explain why you aren’t seeing the images from the other year: Lightroom Classic can open only one catalog at a time. If you don’t know if you created separate catalogs, check the submenu File  > Open Recent. If you recently worked with different catalogs, they will be listed there and you can re-open them there.  If you find out that you did make two separate catalogs and want to combine them, you can for example open the 2025 catalog and choose File > Import From Another Catalog, and select the 2024 catalog. That would import the 2024 catalog into the 2025 catalog, and it would list both volumes in the Folders panel. Then from that point on you would only need to work only in the 2025 catalog, and import future images into that catalog so that everything is in one place.

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