Please help! -- Problems using catalog & photos on external drive across two computers

[LiquidFractal]

Hello, and please help!

I want to be able to work on my images on my desktop and my laptop where necessary.  I have followed Adobe's recommendations, which are to copy images and catalog files to an external HD (fully backed up) and use that.

So I have connected the HD to my laptop and double-clicked the catalog file to open it in LrC.  The thumbnails show up but none of the files can be found by LrC on my laptop.  I'm pretty new to LrC but I presume this is because the original catalog file was linked to images in external drive H: (which is what it is on my desktop), but when I connect this drive to my laptop it's drive G.

So is there an easy way to fix this, i.e. to tell LrC to always look for all catalog images in the current drive as opposed to fiddling around with allocating drive letters in Windows?

Thanks!

[yamato7]

PCに接続されているドライブによって、ドライブレターが違ってきてしまうので、予めドライブレターの設定をしてしまい、デスクトップとラップトップで同じドライブレターを使用するようにしてしまえばいいと思います。

リンク先は日本語OSでの設定なので、英語で説明されているページを探してみてください。

https://www.buffalo.jp/support/faq/detail/11300.html

[F. McLion]

Here's how to assign a fixed drive letter for removable drives - in english:

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/assign-permanent-letter-removable-usb-drive-windows/

[LiquidFractal]

Thanks to @yamato7 and @F. McLion for their answers.  I was hoping there was a way to do it within LrC (Adobe's documentation suggested that LrC would take care of this), but I guess I'll have to go down the Windows road and allocate a drive letter.  Thanks again for the assistance!

[Ian Lyons]

As others have advised, the drive letter must be fixed on Windows systems.

>  I was hoping there was a way to do it within LrC (Adobe's documentation suggested that LrC would take care of this)

Typically, bold text above only applies to Mac systems. Can you provide a link to where Adobe documents indicate that it also applies to Windows systems?

[LiquidFractal]

When I read the Adobe documentation I presumed it was general information which applied to all platforms, but I could also have misread it in that respect.  Seems like this hard-drive path issue would be a good fix for a future version...?

[Jim Wilde]

One way to create a setup whereby changing drive letters is not an issue (or even changing between Mac and Windows systems) would be to put the images into the same folder as the catalog with the images parent folder at the same root level as the catalog file. That way, Lightroom will use the relative path address from catalog to images, so will not need to know what drive letter or name the images are actually on.

This is the procedure that "Export as Catalog" follows, i.e. if "negatives" are included in the export, they are stored in the same folder as the exported catalog, in the same folder structure as used in the original catalog. Opening that catalog on a different system automatically finds the associated images, no matter if the drive letter of the drive differs on the new system or if the new system is a different OS.

Caveat: Anyone planning to use this "feature" to seamlessly switch between Mac and Windows would obviously need to ensure the external drive is formatted in such a way that both operating systems can read and write to the drive (e.g. ExFAT).