How Move Photos to Another Hard Drive Without Screwing LR Folders Up?

[TomBrooklyn]

Ver 1.4

What's the best way to move a large 54GB folder and a bunch of sub-folders and sub-sub-folders etc. of photographs to another hard drive? Almost, but possibly not quite all of these photos are cataloged in Lightroom.

I've done this before with 2''7 and 2''8 and wound up with a big mess of photos Lightroom couldn't find and had to be sorted out. I forget what I did, but there must be a better way, cleaner way that will perform this operation in an orderly organized fashion.

 

[Denis Pagé]

This is very similar to a move to another computer. But check your hierarchy first!

The hierarchy is the very most important step before beginning!
Then you can:[list type=decimal]
[li]Copy the top level folder to the new drive.[/li]
[li]In Lightroom, right-click the top level folder and choose "Update Folder Location..." and navigate to the top level folder on the NEW drive.[/li]
[/list]You can check to see if it is a success by renaming the top level folder of the OLD drive outside Lightroom and then, if OK, Lightroom won't show any "?" mark on any photo in grid and any missing folder. Once you are confident that all is right. you can delete from the old drive.

 

[TomBrooklyn]

Hi Denis,

Thanks for that info.

The way I read it, it says make sure I have a top level folder for everything I want to move. I already do. In this case, I am moving all 2''9 photos and I have a 2''9 top level that is empty of photos but is the top designator for all dates in 2''9. (I catalog by date.)

Next it seems, I move my whole 2''9 to the other drive outside of Lightroom. Then I point the 2''9 catalog in LR to the other drive.

Seems simple enough. Will try now.