How to store images for Lightroom on two different hard drives.....because they don't all fit on one!

[as73]

Hi,

I have many years of images in LR, now close to 1Tb, all stored on one external Hard Drive (and a separate back up hd, but that's not part of this question).

I have so many old hard drives that I've upgraded to over the years I was wondering if I can avoid buying another set of 2Tb drives and instead just use two 1Tb drives with all my images on them.....? Is that possible for LR to work with say images from 2000-2010 on HD1, and all my images from 2011-present on HD2, all part of the same catalog (with the catalog on my computers internal drive)?

Just to be clear I want to have all the images available at the same time; if I search for a certain keyword, I want LR to look at for images with that keyword on both HD 1 and HD 2, and me to be able to access them and adjust or add them to collections etc.

Thanks for any input!

Alan.

[ManiacJoe]

I currently use three drives, two internal and one external USB.

LR does not care how many drives you are using; use as many as you want.

You can setup the folder organization any way that makes sense for you.

Just keep an eye on the "copy" vs "add" import type at the top-center of the Import dialog.

LR will automatically add the new drives to your Folders panel when you import new photos using a new drive. Each drive has its own folder tree.

[as73]

It seems like I will have to "locate" each folder of images after I have

split the hard drive into two drives, otherwise LR doesn't know where the

photographs are...? Hours of work as I have probably a thousand folders....?

Is there any way Lightroom can "locate" entire folders and re- link them to

the catalog?

Thanks,

Alan.

On Sat, Sep 23, 2017 at 12:25 AM, ManiacJoe <forums_noreply@adobe.com>

[Abambo]

you do all operation from inside of Lr. Then Lr keeps track of where to find your files.

[ManiacJoe]

You just need to do the "find missing folder" on the top-most folder that moved and LR will fix everything under it.

[dj_paige]

When you import new files, set the Destination (in the Lightroom Import dialog box on the right) to a folder on the new external HD. It really is that simple.

[as73]

Thanks dj,

I'm not importing "new" images, I just want to move old images onto a new

hard drive but keep them linked to the original catalog.

Alan.

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

as73  wrote

Thanks dj,

I'm not importing "new" images, I just want to move old images onto a new

hard drive but keep them linked to the original catalog.

Alan.

But at some point, you will import new images, just put them on the new drive, and leave the old ones where they are, it doesn't get any simpler than that.

If you must move the photos to the new drive, I think you are making extra work for yourself, and work that many people can't seem do properly. If you still want to move the photos to the new drive, here are the instructions. Scroll down to the section entitled "Part 2 — Updating Folder Location". When you do the copy to the new drive, DO NOT CHANGE the folder hierarchy in any way. Keep things simple. Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders

[as73]

Thanks everyone for the responses and suggestions.

I may not have phrased my question initially the best way but what I've learned is:

Multiple HD's are no problem in LR. As you fill them up, just keep adding them, and all images will be in one catalog, even though they can be on different HD's, internal, or multiple external drives.

The mess I was in was actually that my 1T drive was totally full, which is a bad situation. I wanted to remove the last 10% or so of images to leave some space on the HD (as I've always heard that it's a bad idea to completely max out a HD), put those images in a new HD, and use that HD going forward for all new images added...

It is possible to just drag and drop the folders from the old to new HD, within Lightroom, but that seems to be a risky way to do it. As Lightroom moves the files it deletes them from the old location as it adds them to the new location. If anything goes wrong in this process, they're gone for good (and they're not in the system trash). It's also extremely slow to use this method.

What I did was (thanks dj_paige !) in the system finder, copy the folder to the new HD. Open Lightroom and go to the original folder, control+click on the folder icon to get the drop down menu with "Update Folder Location". Now Lightroom will access those files from the new location and the old folder will be removed from Lightroom (but it's still on the system, untouched). As everything looked good in the new location, I went into the system finder and deleted the folder at the old location. In the end not so laborious because I had a folder named "2016" with about 50 subfolders inside (aprox 80gb of images); I was able to move the "2016" folder and with one click (Update Folder Location) Lightroom knew where all the subfolders and images were...

Thanks again to everyone for your help, much appreciated!

Alan.

[cmgap]

To follow up on the responses from MJ and DJ... Have you looked into working with Collections and Smart Previews at all?

Perhaps going forward you can integrate them into you workflow so that you can continue to edit images even if the EHDs they are located on are not connected. In this instance you'll be able to create collections of your best images and make smart previews. These collections can also be synced to Lightroom Mobile which will allow you to access them on any browser, smart phone or tablet whenever you want.

How to use Smart Previews to view and edit photos in Photoshop Lightroom

[Abambo]

Let me add my 5 cents here:

as others have stated, there is absolutely no problem for Lr working with as many disks your system supports.

I have also noted, that you are well aware of the backup problem that's good and gives you some security. There is apossibility working only with ONE drive and avoiding having to buy many drives:

you take one 2TB drive as a work disk and distribute your backups on 2 1TB disks (old photos / new photos).

The way, Lr works will ensure, that the disk containing the old photos backup will never need to be updated, as you will never add pictures to those directories, except if you export to an external program (like nik photo collection) where a new local copy is created.

Even if you do new edits to old pictures, they will be recorded in the database (catalog) residing on your internal disk. Original pictures will not be touched. (If you do not use sidecar files)

Second possibility: If you do not have the first HD with your old pictures connected, you can still do all your search operations to the whole database, because all info is stored in the database. You will only need to connect the disk with the old pictures, if you want exporting some of them.

For the Backup: please do not forget to backup your database (backups NEED to be stored on a separate disk (may be your pictures disk or your backup disk or both) for complete disaster recovery in case of failure of your internal drive.