CHANGING TO A NEW HARD DRIVE FOR STORING ORIGINALS

[Kathleen]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom version: 5.0 x64 (LR Mobile)

Operating System

1. Windows 10

In preference, I have selected “Store a copy of all originals at the specified location”. And the “specified location” is an external hard drive. That hard drive is now full and I would like to use a new drive to store all the originals going forward. I DO NOT want it to store the pictures that are already on the old hard drive.

For example, my 1st hard drive stores pictures 1 through 1000. I want the new drive to store pictures 1001 and on from there. I DO NOT want the new drive to store photos 1-1000 as I already have a copy of those.

The new drive has a different name than the old drive and I’ve tried telling LR to “forget” the old drive. But no matter what I do, LR copies photos 1-1000 onto the new drive. This seems like a stupid default position as I now have 2 full hard drives with the same photos on each.

It seems like this should be so easy and I’m just missing something. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Johan Elzenga]

I don’t think you’re missing something. Lightroom has an option to store a copy of the originals in a (one) location of your choice. It does not have folder management so you can store them in different locations. Of course you can delete them from the old drive now, so you can use that for something else.

 

[Kathleen]

Thanks for the quick reply. So what do I do when the "(one)" location, in my case--an external hard drive, is full?

I just want to use addition hard drives for back up as each one gets full--without having duplicates on any of them. See what I'm saying? :')

 

[Jim Wilde]

Yes, we see what you're saying, but that simply cannot be done....you can have ONE location for the local copy of all the stored originals, and the only thing you can change is the location. When you do change the location, Lightroom is supposed to MOVE the existing local copy to the new location, so that you don't end up with multiple copies.

 

[Kathleen]

Well shoot. Not the answer I wanted. But thanks for the help. I'll have to come up with a different plan.

 

[clee01l]

Well shoot. Not the answer I wanted. But thanks for the help. I'll have to come up with a different plan.

Still, I think it is a workable answer. Your old location gets copied to the new volume and the new volume can be large enough to accommodate all of your images now and in the future. A 5 TB seagate external HDD is available from Amazon for $99.


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[Kathleen]

Agreed! I think instead of checking that preference box to have LR save the photos automatically, I'm going to export the pictures once they're all edited. That way the hard drive can have some kind of folder/album structure that makes sense to me.

Just needed an answer so I could stop beating my head against the wall trying to figure it out.

Thanks again everyone!

 

[clee01l]

Agreed! I think instead of checking that preference box to have LR save the photos automatically, I'm going to export the pictures once they're all edited. That way the hard drive can have some kind of folder/album structure that makes sense to me.

Just needed an answer so I could stop beating my head against the wall trying to figure it out.

Thanks again everyone!

I don’t think you understand how Lightroom is designed to work. First, Lightroom does not organize by folders. In the cloud the images files are stored in the database by creation date. There are no folders in the cloud. Lightroom uses Albums to organize your images. What Lightroom calls “Folders” are containers for Albums. They are not the same as filesystem folders and this confuses some people.
The store a local copy of your files is an option to have a copy of your cloud images in the cloud and locally. These two copies of image have no relationship. Any edit adjustments are applied to the cloud copy of the image and never associate with the extra copy of the image file stored locally.

Exporting one edited will create a derivative file with Lightroom Adjustments and it won’t be kept in sync with and subsequent changes that you make to the image. Plus it is a different image from the original.

If you want a backup of the Cloud, an unedited local copy of the original imported file is the best you can get and that does not back up any edit adjustments, Titles, Captions, Keywords and pick flags the you might have made on the image in the Adobe cloud.


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