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Best way to move catalog and photos from desktop to laptop with external HDD?

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wanaride

New Member
Joined
May 6, 2015
Messages
8
Location
Salisbury, NC
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic CC version 8.2
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.14 Mojave
I'm using Lightroom Classic CC v8.2.

My LR catalog and photos are on an iMac internal drive. I want to move my LR Classic catalog onto my new MacBook Pro laptop, and my photos onto an external hard drive.

Here is what I tried:
Step 1: copy the catalog/files and photos (in "Digital Photos" folder with subfolder hierarchy) from iMac to an external HDD.
Step 2: connect external HDD to laptop, copy the catalog onto the laptop, open laptop LR catalog.

All photos have an exclamation mark; clicking on the exclamation mark shows the original iMac location (Users/ron/Desktop/Digital Pictures/year/month/date).

When I expand "Folders" I see the external HDD and "Digital Photos" folder but I only see one subfolder (2019) under it, not the 20-some odd folders that actually exist there.

Questions...
  • How do I show all of the subfolders in the external HDD "Digital Photos" folder?
  • How do I get LR to connect with the photos in the external HDD "Digital Photos" folder and subfolders?
 
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Yes, thanks for that. Step 6 says "Otherwise, right-click on the parent folder that we created in step 1, and choose Find Missing Folder from the context-sensitive menu, and navigate to the new location of that folder."

In my case, "Digital Pictures" is the parent folder. When I right-click on the parent folder, I do not see "Find Missing Folder" in the context-sensitive menu.

What do I try next?
 

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Digital Pictures is not missing, so the menu is ‘Update Folder Location’ in this case. I’m not sure what the problem is, however, because that folder is already on the external drive. Isn’t that what you wanted?
 
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Thanks Johan! The "Update Folder Location" choice fixed things. The catalog on my laptop now points to the photos on the external HDD.

It is interesting that the collection "Missing Photographs" shows almost as many photos as my entire catalog, and none of the "missing" photos has an exclamation mark on it. What could cause a "Missing Photographs" temporary collection to be filled with photos without exclamation marks?
 
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You need to run the [Find all Missing Photos] from the menu once again to refresh (or update) the list of 'Missing Photographs' in the Catalog panel.
 
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