changing from hardrive to desktop

[leeadaniel]

Hi,All my files have been worked on from an external hard drive, not ideal i know. But recently these have all been copied to my desktop, from which I wish to work in the future.How do I get lightroom to recognise these? Do I have to re-import all these files back into lightroom, even though they are exactly the same files and if so how?
Many thanks.
leeadaniel

 

[Andrew Hayton]

If the structure is the same then you should be able to get LR to link up to the top most file and LR will see the rest. What you should have done is to use LR to move the files from the external to the internal.

 

[leeadaniel]

Hi,Thanks for the reply. The files are still on my external, how do I get lightroom to move them to my internal??
Thanks

 

[dj_paige]

[quote author=leeadaniel link=topic=7563.msg51734#msg51734 date=125'456'37]
Hi,All my files have been worked on from an external hard drive, not ideal i know. But recently these have all been copied to my desktop, from which I wish to work in the future. How do I get lightroom to recognise these? Do I have to re-import all these files back into lightroom, even though they are exactly the same files and if so how?[/quote]

Re-import files is NEVER a good idea. It should only be done as a last resort, when nothing else has worked.

In LR, you move folders to a new hard drive, over on the left in the Folders panel. You drag the folder from the disk it is on, to the disk where you want it to be. Just like you would do in your operating system.

 

[clee01l]

[quote author=leeadaniel link=topic=7563.msg51738#msg51738 date=125'45714']
Hi,Thanks for the reply. The files are still on my external, how do I get lightroom to move them to my internal??
Thanks
[/quote]Drag and drop. In your folders panel, you should see both volumes listed If you don't, click on the (+) on the Folders section and Add A Folder from your Desktop wher you want the images to live. If you already have uncatalogued images in a folder on your desktop, choose a new empty one so as not to complicate the process. When you drag your catalogued images from the external drive LR will re-point all the catalog data to the new location and move the files. In LR, drag a folder from the External HD volume to the new location on the desktop. The time this takes dependds upon the size of the image files to be moves and the speed of your connection to the External HD.

 

[Denis Pagé]

As you said the files were already copied to the internal drive, just right-click the top level folder and choose "Update folder location..." then navigate to the new place on the internal drive. After that, you can unplug the external and if there are no "?" marks, you will be all set.

 

[RikkFlohr]

You don't say which operating system you are using in your profile. You should fill that out. If you are using a Windows OS, you may be limited in doing this. If memory serves XP has a 256 character path length limitation. The desktop in XP has a long path name already. If you have a folder structure for your Lightroom files that has many subfolders with lengthy names and/or long file names, you may reach this limit.