When you start to run low on hard drive space, you may try to solve the problem by buying additional hard drives. However, over time, it’s easy to end up with photos all over the place, and then it’s hard to check that they’re all being backed up. In an attempt to simplify, you may buy a huge drive that will hold everything, but then, how do you consolidate all your photos into an organized file structure on the new drive without losing your edits?
The General Plan
First, consider consolidating all of the photos in a single catalog, if they’re not already. One catalog generally makes everything easier to manage. You can learn how to consolidate them in this post: Merging Catalogs – The Overview. We’ll assume you’re already using a single catalog.
We’re going to copy all the photos from the various drives onto the new drive, then get the catalog to recognize the new location of all the files. Once the photos are on a single drive, it’s easier to move files into the new folder structure of your choice.
Consolidate the Files on the New Drive
Ready? Let’s get started.
- Ensure that each drive has one parent folder showing in Lightroom’s Folders panel. This will make it easy to reconnect the folders after moving them. You can learn how in this post: I have a long list of folders—can I change it to show the folder hierarchy?
- To make identification easy, make a list of the existing drives and the parent folder name on each drive. For example, Seagate 2TB External – My Photos or Old Drive E – My Pictures.
- On the new drive, use Explorer (Windows) / Finder (Mac) to create a folder for each drive. Give the folders the same names you noted in step 2.
- Using Explorer (Windows) / Finder (Mac), copy the photos from the first drive into the matching folder on the new drive, making sure that you maintain the parent/child folder hierarchy as you move. Don’t start reorganizing the photos yet!
- In Lightroom, right-click on the first drive’s parent folder that you created in step 1, choose Find Missing Folder / Update Folder Location (depending on which is showing) and navigate to the drive’s folder on the new large drive. The photos disappear from the old drive volume heading in Lightroom’s Folders panel and reappear under the new large drive. (There’s more information on fixing missing photos in this post Lightroom thinks my photos are missing—how do I fix it?).
- Repeat steps 4 and 5 for each of the remaining drives. By the time you’ve finished, the photos will all be listed in the new drive in the Folders panel.
- Back up the catalog and set-up a new backup system for all the photos before rearranging further.
Congratulations, you now have all your files consolidated on the new drive! Set aside the old drives as backup until you’re completely satisfied that everything has transferred and is working correctly, just in case you discover some corrupted or missing files on the new disk.
Consider Your Folder Structure
Having consolidated everything on a single drive, it’s a good time to think about your new, preferred folder structure. You can learn about the pros and cons of different folder structures here. Many like the simple, date-based structure YYYY/MM/DD (year/month/date). Some people like to add some sort of event or subject name to the DD, such as DD-Vacation. 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.
Once you’ve chosen a folder structure, create that new folders and move (drag and drop) the files within Lightroom from the old drive’s folders to your new folder structure. As long as you move photo files within Lightroom, the catalog will be kept up to date. There’s more detailed instructions in these posts: How do I reorganize my Folders panel? and How do I rearrange existing photos into a new dated folder structure?
To minimise risk, don’t move too many files at once. Also, be sure to back up the catalog frequently. If you’re using a laptop, make sure that your AC or mains power adapter is plugged in, as you won’t want Lightroom to crash while you’re moving files.
Check Your Backups!
Finally, check is that all of your files are now being backed up. The obvious ones are the photos and the catalog, but this is a good time to check all the others that should be too. Here’s the full list of files: Which Lightroom files do I need to back up?
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So, on my continued quest to consolidate onto one drive — from originally >80k photos spread unevenly across 10 drives — I completed the operation today. However, I still need to convert my file structure from topic to date (year-month) and then create two levels of backup.
There are some extra non-photo files that got copied as I did the consolidation, but I can clean them up as part of the file structure conversion by, basically, leaving them behind. The process I used was derived from your blog posts and feedback on them and the addition of the PetaPixel article on splitting everything up into 4 parts to let them multitask.
To this point, here is what I did:
1. Find Missing and repair all missing.
2. Find & Delete Duplicates (using the tool you recommended)
–> I used 15 passes to do this (more on why later)
–> As part of this, I found another disk with pictures that were not in the library, so I imported
them, checking not to import suspected duplicates
3. Total photographs at this point was >80k.
4. After deleting missing photographs, there was a reduction but then I found that it said files were
deleted but they really were not. Turns out I had an old version of NTFS for macOS that came
with the disk drives that would not let me write to both brands. So, I needed to upgrade that (for
about US$17 from Paragon Software). Then, re-running, all was good.
5. I also took the opportunity to do disk checks on all the drives, just to be sure (all were good).
6. I then saw that while I had ~41k photos left, the de-dup program was only seeing ~12k. Hmmm….
After a bit of web searching, it turns out that I had not unstacked my photos prior to running it.
Once I did that, all ~41k photos were scanned for duplicates and I ended-up with ~40k photos.
7. Then, I created the target folders on the consolidation drive with the folders matching the parent
folder on each of the drives. I used the naming convention of “from xxxx” where “xxxx” was the
high-level parent folder.
8. I then copied the folders over in using copy/paste in Finder (I am using a Mac) and then used
VisualDiffer to verify the files I wanted were copied (don’t forget to change the “session options”
to “filename only” or you will be waiting a long time and they won’t match, anyways).
9. Once verified, I updated the file location for each of the parent files and then re-ran the check for
missing files. No problems in any of the copies, but it was good to be sure.
10. Ran the “missing photos” check again (split into 4 parts again, simultaneously) and no problems.
So, finally, ready for restructuring the folders and backing up.
Probably to this point, it has taken about 40 hours, but I have been meticulous in documenting each step and verifying along the way, as Victoria has recommended.
This is incredibly satisfying as I have been planning to do this for years (as my wife reminds me regularly) and now I have done it. The consolidation has been onto a Seagate 4TB drive and it is at about 65% full. I will be copying them, for the new file structure, onto an 8TB Seagate drive and then will use the 4TB drive for my non-photo work files.
Then, backing-up using either a backup program or onto PhotoShelter or both.
But, again, I could not have not have done this without the outstanding tutorials and recommendations found here on Victoria’s website and her books. Thank you, Victoria!
The duplicate photo finder software I used was Teekesselchen (open source donationware) (meant to mention it).
Wow, Karl. This is pretty much exactly what I am wanting to do – I have images spread over three drives, two of them being external SSD drives (a 1 TB and a 2 TB). But there is so much of this that I have no clue what you are talking about. I think I can figure out much of it but what I need to do first is to get the new single consolidation drive to show in Lightroom, then start transferring the files from the other drives.
Now that I have found all the missing links and de-dup’d (81k+ -> ~41k photos) I am ready to consolidate from my 8 or 9 drives to one. Just for good measure, I have validated all the drives involved so I am unlikely to have disk errors when doing so.
After de-duping, I found an article elsewhere about re-creating the previews in a sensible manner and did that prior to making this next move (https://petapixel.com/2020/05/23/how-to-rebuild-lightroom-previews-to-optimize-speed-space-and-integrity/ splitting the 41k in half so they could run in parallel).
The instructions above are excellent and straight-forward and the addition of the renaming of the folders to a zero in front makes great sense.
I got to thinking, though, about going outside Lightroom to create the new directories and then copy the files. Lightroom usually says to do everything within Lightroom.
Is there a way to do this within Lightroom? And, if so, is there a reason to not do so (such as taking a lot longer to do, or…)?
And, thank you for the pointer to “Visual Differ”!
There have been rare reports of images “disappearing” when doing large moves within Lightroom, which is why we’re recommending copying using Explorer/Finder. The reason the advice is usually to do everything in Lightroom is to avoid losing the links between the files and the metadata. As long as you immediately update Lightroom’s links and don’t go away and forget, that’s fine.
Thank you — that explains it. I am going to use the method you described. These processes are immensely helpful. Thank you! I will continue to update as I go and summarize at the end. After this, I am going to rearrange the folders by date as suggested and should, then, be done. And, backups of catalog throughout, rename of catalog at the end, and final backup using the recommended program.
This is exactly what I needed, Victoria. One of my concerns is that when moving files from one place to another (I have a lot of experience with this when archiving my Evernote scans) oftentimes, the number of files copied to the target drive doesn’t match the number of files on the source drive. I like using Pathfinder rather than Finder because it natively has two side-by-side windows and also, I can view hidden files. So then there’s the extra step of having to compare file names from source to target to find which files didn’t copy. I have had a similar experience within Lightroom where the number of files doesn’t match what is expected. It’s much harder within the Lightroom catalog to find out what didn’t move over. This is a very stressful process for me and one I put off longer than I should.
Glad to help Robin. A tip for comparing – there’s an app called Visual Differ that can do that comparison for you. You’ll find it on the app store and it can compare entire folder structures automatically for you, showing you which ones are missing or didn’t copy perfectly.
Does this also work for moving to a synology RAID?
Hi Mike
It will, Lightroom just sees this as a volume (or large drive) that it sees the photos on. I have exactly that set-up here, works well (and fast)
Paul
Yep, that’s the way to go. I usually add one extra step to the process. Rename the old folders by adding a 0 in front of their names so Lightroom “misses” them. Once you updated the folder location, you have a visual indication that everything went fine and in the end, you didn’t forget a folder.
Good tip Henk, thanks for sharing.