Re-importing from internal drive to external

[Katherine Mann]

I just returned from a road trip. My photos were imported to my laptop hard drive during the time I was away. Now I would like to move those photos to my external drive and organize them by date. As the photos are already imported Lightroom won't let me simply move them and re-organize them.

I am missing something simple ... can anyone help me out?

 

[DGStinner]

Does the external drive show up in your Folders panel? If so, there's no reason why Lightroom won't let you simply move them.
How do I move only my photos to another hard drive

 

[Katherine Mann]

Does the external drive show up in your Folders panel? If so, there's no reason why Lightroom won't let you simply move them.
How do I move only my photos to another hard drive

Thanks for your reply. Yes, the external shows up - I have all my photos from 2016 on that drive. My problem is that I not only put the new photos on my internal drive while I was away but also that I imported them into Lightroom. Now, when I want to put them on the external, by date, Lightroom sees them as already imported and won't let me do anything with them.

 

[DGStinner]

You don't need to reimport them. Just move them within Lightroom.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

In Lightroom, drag the folder with the images from the internal HD to the external HD.

 

[Katherine Mann]

In Lightroom, drag the folder with the images from the internal HD to the external HD.

Thank you Johan. Can I apply the filter that rearranges them by date. The problem with the folder on the internal drive is that it is undifferentiated by date. I suppose I can live with that though.

 

[john.jcb]

I think you will need to set up your desired folder structure on the external drive and then drag the images while in LR in batches to the new structure.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Correct. You can't apply that filter, because all you do is move a folder, just like you can move a folder in Windows Explorer.

 

[Katherine Mann]

Thanks John and Johan. I think you are right. Oh well, it's only two weeks of wonderful Arizona. I can manage. You are all very kind to help me out.

 

[rob211]

Maybe I missed something, but this might work.

Lr won't let you import the same file. But you could delete the AZ images from Lr's (but NOT from your internal drive!). Then go into the import module, and instead of using "ADD" use "MOVE" and choose a date-based option for the destination on your external. But be CAREFUL: if you delete them from the catalog to do this I expect you'd lose info related to those images already stored in the catalog. So it would be useful ONLY if you hadn't done much of anything to edit, etc the images. And be sure you have a backup first.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Like you said: You can do that, but you will lose everything (edits, keywords) you've already done with these photos, so normally that's a very bad idea.

 

[Katherine Mann]

Maybe I missed something, but this might work.

Lr won't let you import the same file. But you could delete the AZ images from Lr's (but NOT from your internal drive!). Then go into the import module, and instead of using "ADD" use "MOVE" and choose a date-based option for the destination on your external. But be CAREFUL: if you delete them from the catalog to do this I expect you'd lose info related to those images already stored in the catalog. So it would be useful ONLY if you hadn't done much of anything to edit, etc the images. And be sure you have a backup first.

That might work Rob. I'll give it a go. I have all the original photos on my cards in any case so if importing from the internal drive doesn't work I still have my backup so that I can just re-import. Thanks.

 

[Katherine Mann]

Like you said: You can do that, but you will lose everything (edits, keywords) you've already done with these photos, so normally that's a very bad idea.

As I haven't done anything but the most rudimentary edits I won't lose anything. I didn't keyword. I just have a folder on the internal drive entitled "Arizona". Deleting it isn't a complete problem.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

You'd lose those 'most rudimentary edits' (whatever these are), but it's up to you to decide what to do...

 

[Katherine Mann]

By "rudimentary edits" I mean those quick first passes that I make before settling in to do some serious work. Normally I use Lightroom for categorizing and organizing my photos, do a quick edit to get the histogram in order before I move to Ps for serious work. I am not saying that Lr isn't a full-fledged brilliant program, but I have been a photoshopper for twenty years and feel more confident working with it.

What I finally did to solve my problem was to remove the Arizona photos that I had imported into Lr while on the road and then I imported from the original card, unclicking the "do not import suspected duplicates" function. It worked fine.

Thanks everyone for your help. I admit that the solution was actually quite simple but I could not get my head around it this morning.