• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.
  • Dark mode now has a single preference for the whole site! It's a simple toggle switch in the bottom right-hand corner of any page. As it uses a cookie to store your preference, you may need to dismiss the cookie banner before you can see it. Any problems, please let us know!

Problem moving photos from one hard drive to another

Status
Not open for further replies.

renouj21

New Member
Joined
Mar 25, 2011
Messages
22
Location
Cookham, Berkshire, England
Operating System: Mac OS 10.13
Exact Lightroom Version (Help menu > System Info): 6.7

I've shifted my photos from a failing hard drive to a new hard drive. When I try to update the folder location as per this post How do I move only my photos to another hard drive, leaving the catalog where it is? | The Lightroom Queen nothing happens. All the photos in LR still have the exclamation mark next to them. One thing that may be affecting this is that prior to updating the folder location I manually found a sub folder by clicking on an exclamation mark and navigating to the (new) hard drive location (this one sub folder is now the only set of photos without an exclamation mark). If this is the problem I don't know how to undo it. If it isn't the problem, I'm at a loss as to why the photos aren't showing up, even though the folder location has been updated. Any help much appreciated.
 
Check the folder panel. Are the folders listed a missing (question mark and name in italics)? If not, then it seems you may have moved the contents of the folders and so relinking the folders does not make Lightroom find the photos again.
 
Check the folder panel. Are the folders listed a missing (question mark and name in italics)? If not, then it seems you may have moved the contents of the folders and so relinking the folders does not make Lightroom find the photos again.

Thanks v much for getting back to me.
The folders are listed as missing under the heading of the old drive, but the new drive is only showing the one sub folder I relinked to manually by clicking on the photo and choosing the "locate" option. All the folders are still listed under the old drive heading, but this is greyed out, as that drive is no longer attached to the computer.
(What I've done is made an exact clone of my old drive, but on a new disk, so all the folders are in the same folder structure, but on a new disk. I don't know if it makes any difference, but the photos are all stored in my own folder structure, not "inside" Lightroom)
 
OK, then there is no problem. You haven't relinked the folders yet. In the Lightroom folder panel, right-click on the top folder of the old drive, and choose 'Find Missing Folder'. In the dialog box that follows, navigate to the corresponding folder on the new drive and select it. Done. The folder and all its subfolders should 'jump' from the old drive to the new one. If you have more than one top folder, you have to repeat this for each one. If you get a question about existing folders and do you want to merge them, then click 'Merge'.
 
the photos are all stored in my own folder structure, not "inside" Lightroom)
This jumped out at me. Pictures are never stored "inside" LightRoom. LR is only the catalog.

Just don't want you to think you can delete the external picture. That's a recipe for disaster as you will lose everything.
 
OK, then there is no problem. You haven't relinked the folders yet. In the Lightroom folder panel, right-click on the top folder of the old drive, and choose 'Find Missing Folder'. In the dialog box that follows, navigate to the corresponding folder on the new drive and select it. Done. The folder and all its subfolders should 'jump' from the old drive to the new one. If you have more than one top folder, you have to repeat this for each one. If you get a question about existing folders and do you want to merge them, then click 'Merge'.
Fantastic! So simple, and now sorted. Thank you
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top