Cant create collection set from existing collections on external RAID drive

[chrishowe]

I can create collection sets from existing collectiosn when working on a catalogue on my C drive, but it does not work when I try to do it on my "archive" LR catalogue on the large external RAID drive - any ideas / solutions?

 

[clee01l]

Color me dense, but I think I need more information.
Is your external drive direct (USB/Firewire) connected or via a network? Is your catalog on the External drive too? How did it get there? via Export as Catalog ? or did you move this catalog and image files outside of LR?
Are you trying to create a collection for other existing collections or is this a misunderstanding of terminology? Or are you trying to create a collection set? Are these Static Collections or Smart Collectiions? And which type of collection are you trying to create?

 

[chrishowe]

Ah - thanks for asking - external drive is via network (cable). yes my archive cat is on this external drive (its big!). Each time I add folders etc to the archive cat (from my working cat on C drive) I export as cat. I have 3 existing collections in this instance (such as Brycepics1, Brycepics2, Brycepics3 ... and I want to group them into a collection set (static) within an existing collection set of mine called "Big Trips". This tidying up just saves me having either no collections or hundreds showing.

 

[clee01l]

I hope that you know that your catalog file (the one with the .lrcat extension) can not be opened if it is on a network drive. The image files referenced by the catalog can reside on a network drive. You also should know that you are not able to do operations on more than one catalog at a time.
So. which catalog (.lrcat file) are you trying to work in to create this collection set? Have you copied this catalog back from the Network drive to a local drive to create this collection set? If you cvan ctreate the Collection set in the catalog that is open, you can in the Collections panel simply drag the other collections that are not in the set to the Collection set and drop them into it.

If you read much on this forum, you will repeatedly hear that strong recommendation to work in one master catalog. You can do this and archive older image files on a network drive. This is how I manage my image files. I have a Master catalofg. It has ~25K images on a local drive and two network drives. I have the images that are older than ~3 months on the network drives and the current images on the local. I have collection sets in that master catalog that reference collections of images that reside on the local drive, and the two network drives.

 

[chrishowe]

Thanks again - archive catalogue (.lrcat) is on C drive, but images are on network drive.

I was trying to work in this archive cat - anyway, once I dealt with the other issue I raised on this forum (2 versions of same hard drive showing in library), moving by dragging my 3 existing collections into a collection set did work today!

After my next shoot I will try having my next set of working images all in the archive catalogue (as I call it), but the images residing on the C drive (for speed of working) as you seem to be suggesting. I just hope that when I move the images over to archive external drive, that I dont have a recurrence of the problem mentioned above.

 

[clee01l]

If you do all your moves inside the folder panel in LR, then LR can adjust its pointers in the catalog to the new locations. This is no different from a move to another folder in the same drive except that it crosses to one of the other top level folder hierarchies.