export Lightroom

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
February 24, 2022
3 replies
164 views

Hey Everyone,

I would like to transfer all my photos from Lightroom to an external hard drive. Now since this is a cloud version this is not going to be done simply via 'export'. I am talking about 25,000 photos so and would like to have them all locally as well.

Does anyone know the answer to this?

regards,
Seppe Vandael

macOS

This topic has been closed for replies.

Jim Wilde

Community Expert

You cannot "transfer" all your photos from Lightroom to an external hard drive. By design, all your master images are stored in the cloud, and that cannot be changed. However, there is an option to store a COPY of all your images on your local system, but note that would be a copy of the original files without edits.

The option is on Lightroom's Preferences>Local Storage tab, but before you select that option you need to give some thought to the specified location (also on that same Preferences tab). The default location for the locally stored originals is inside the Lightroom Library.lrlibrary package in your Pictures folder on the system drive, but you can opt to change that location to another drive. If you want to specify a different location, do that before you enable the option to store a copy of the originals locally.