I decided to subscribe to Lightroom Classic after using Adobe Camera Raw for years. I have a photo archive on an external drive that contains 225 GB of photos in Raw, Photoshop and Jpeg formats. These are all located in subfolders within a single Master Folder. Would there be any problem with importing my entire archive of 225 GB into Lightroom? Any advice would be appreciated.
No problem. "Importing" is really "cataloguing", so the number of Gb doesn't matter, and Lightroom Classic can catalogue tens or hundreds of thousands of images (or more). Just import with the Add option in the import dialog box.
Backing up your catalogue (just the lrcat file, not the previews) is important, and it will take longer if the catalogue is bigger, but this largely depends on your backup speed. A big catalogue is still small compared to 225gb and more images.
Photos can reside anywhere, you can keep them on that external hard drive. They do not need to be on the same drive as the catalog. When you go to import them into your catalog, you can simply choose ADD as opposed to Copy, Copy as DNG or MOVE. No files will be moved, so very little drive activity (catalog mod occurs, so some activity) Basicaly the catalog, and the catalog is a database, will get modified. Should not take forever.
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