i have over 300,000 photos in my catalogue. the catalogue (and backups) are on my internal HD on an IMAC.
i have the photos spread over 6 or 7 hard drives, each in a folder by date.
here's the problem-as i ran out of room on one external drives, i originally "squeezed" new files that i imported into any drive that had space on it...
So, now i sit with some photos from 2017 spread over multiple hard drives, sometimes i have the same MO/DA/YY on different drives (not duplicate files but different photos from the same day on different drives).
I have a brand new 8TB drive that i'd like to use to reorganize my folders by year and month.
i'd like to create a new catalogue on that drive and export from the current catalogue, import into it (to the proper mo/da/yy).
Will this work? if so, how do i do it?
thanks.
I'm sure that other people will have better suggestions than mine, but here are my ideas, just to get the ball rolling.
To clarify, you have only ONE catalog, but the photos in that catalog are spread out right now over 6-7 separate hard drives. You now want to consolidate all those photos onto one new 8 TB hard drive.
Here is how I would approach this problem. The first thing to do is get all those photos onto the new HDD and have the catalog recognize the new drive location of all your files. Then you can move files into the new folder structure of your choice.
1. I would start by assigning names to each of your existing drives, as Drive1, Drive2, etc. You don't need to actually change volume labels, just use "sticky notes" with these names.
2. On the 8 TB drive, create 7 top level folders. Call them Drive1, Drive2, etc.
3. COPY the entire folder structure of Drive1 into the Drive1 folder on the new HDD. (If you MOVE rather than copy, you risk losing files due to data corruption in the data transfer process.)
4. Follow the helpful instructions that Victoria created
Lightroom thinks my photos are missing—how do I fix it? | The Lightroom Queen so that the catalog now recognizes the new location (on the new HDD) of all those photos.
5. Back up the catalog.
5. Repeat steps 3, 4, and 5 for all the remaining drives.
You now have all your files consolidated on the new HDD. Set aside the old HDDs as backup, just in case you discover some corrupted files on the new HDD.
At this point, you should think about your new, preferred folder structure. Some of us like the simple, date-based structure YYYY/MM/DD. Some people like to add some sort of event or subject name to the DD, such as
DD-Phil's Birthday Party. That is entirely optional. YYYY/MM/DD is preferable to DD/MM/YYYY because it's much easier to locate a folder for a given date, even if you live in the USA where we don't normally put year first in dates. For example, I use /Photos as my top level folder and then put in YYYY/MM/DD folders underneath, so photos taken today would be in folder /Photos/2019/04/17. (I use the forward slash in these examples, but if you are a Windows user, you will need to use the backslash, \, to mark folder levels.
Now that you have all your files on one drive, create that new folder structure and move(drag and drop) the files
within Lightroom from the old Drive1/ folders to your new folder structure. As long as you move photo files within Lightroom, the catalog will be kept up to date.
Don't move too many files at once, arbitrarily no more than 50 or 100.
Also, be sure to back up the catalog frequently. If you are using a laptop, make sure that your AC or mains power adapter is plugged in.
Depending on how you have named all your files, you might run into name conflicts, that is, 2 or 3 files with exactly the same date-based name. Unlikely, but not impossible. I'll leave it to others as to how you deal with that issue.
A few final points:
- Be sure to back up both your Lightroom catalog AND your 8 TB drive.
- Get a second 8 TB drive for use as a backup. Depending on how you like to approach this sort of backup, you might find this utility very useful. Scooter Software: Home of Beyond Compare. I use this utility all the time. Another useful utility for drive/folder synchronization is Key Features of GoodSync. Both of these utilities cost money, but they work well, save me lots of time and reduce the errors that would happen if I did backups manually.
- Don't rely just on Lightroom for your catalog backups. There have been too many reports of catalog corruption due to backups. Back up the catalog in a Windows or MacOS folder operation using one of the utilities I just mentioned.
Hope this helps. Keep us posted on your progress. This is a big "migration" and you can expect to need several days to complete this project.
Good luck.
Phil Burton