Moving contents of the original photos in Local Storage in Lightroom to another drive/computer

My question is: if I were to install Lightroom on another PC (or Mac) from scratch, set the location of Local Storage to wherever I want it to be - will it download all the originals from Adobe Cloud, or will I need to use the special downloader that I've seen mentioned in a few articles?  And if I were to move the original photos that are already set up on my first computer to an external SSD - will that affect anything?

 

Taken in isolation, the answers to your two questions are:

1. Installing Lightroom on another system: yes, it will download all the originals, provided you have checked the option in Preferences to "Store a copy of all originals at the specified location". If you don't check the option, Lightroom will temporarily download originals on an "as needed" basis (i.e. when editing or zooming to 1:1). You most definitely do not need to be using the Downloader (even if you used it the downloaded assets would not subsequently be referenced by Lightroom).

2. No, nothing is affected. If you change the location for storing originals in Lightroom's preferences, Lightroom will automatically try to move the assets from the current location to the new location. No need to move them yourself.

The only query is whether you intend to try to share the local copy of the originals between the two systems, rather than maintaining a full copy on each system? If you are thinking of doing that, be aware that it might work, and it might not. I tried it myself in the early testing days and it seemed to work out OK, but others have reported less successful attempts.

Think of the downloader as a lifeboat, just a way to get your files off Adobe if you choose to leave. It is not a way to move local storage.

I think your idea may work, providing you are careful. But I would suggest it will be easier to let your Windows installation download the files to the PC. Remember that the files in the cloud are the key ones - whatever is in local storage is more like a cache, just a convenient way to process at full res.

Moving your originals from one hard drive to another doesn't make any difference. LR uploads all of your images to the cloud and doesn't reference them on your hard drive. You can control where LR stores a local copy in your preferences. I think you need to download the LR downloader.

thttps://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/kb/download-lightroom-photos.html