moving images to a new external drive

[nIkedoni1a]

i'm afraid that i've made a bit of a mess with lightroom. following your advice i went out and got 2 big external hard drives and using windows explorer transferred all of my images to one of them J: . before the transfer my photos we're on a separate internal drive G: and my Lightroom catalog folder is in my pictures on the C: drive. even before the transfer i had a handful of folders that we're red and so not linked with G: and i really don't know why. at this point i have identical files on both G: and J: as well as some old photos on C: that i never imported into Lightroom.

anyway i want to move along with archiving but want to preserve all the editing i've done on raw files to date.
can you help ?

 

[Mark Sirota]

Welcome to Lightroom Forums.

Red folders indicates you're still using LR 1.x, right?

Right-click on one of those red folders, choose "Locate Missing Folder" from the context menu, and navigate to the new location for that folder. You should do this at the highest-level red folder. LR should automatically find the files in the new location and you won't lose a thing.

 

[nIkedoni1a]

yes version 1, do i need to delete them first from G: since they now reside in 2 places and for the ones that are linked to G: how do i get the linked transferred to J:. i eventually want to delete the files from internal drive G: and use 2 external hard drives.

also does the catalog just reside in one place (My Pictures) on C: shouldn't the catalog be backed up to another drive as well? thanks for helping.

 

[Mark Sirota]

Yes, you'll need to delete them from G: first, if LR knows they're there -- which is only the case for the folders that aren't already red.

Or alternately, just rename the top-level folder for safety. (Do this while LR isn't running, then fire up LR.) Don't actually delete them until you're sure all's well.