How To Move Your Lightroom Photos To Another Drive

my name is Terry white and in this episode I'm gonna answer question that I get all the time I teach it in my classes I've recorded it in previous videos but it was always part of other videos or other topics so since I get this question so often I'm gonna make it its own topic its own video so I can just point people to it just go watch this one clip and it will answer the question and that is how do I move my photos from one hard drive to another if they're being managed by Lightroom in other words I don't want to break anything I don't want to Lightroom to lose connection I don't want to lose my edits I don't want to lose anything so how do I do it I'm gonna show you two ways to do it the way that most people probably are doing it now which is not the best way but I'll show you how it works and I'm gonna show you the better way let's do it that way so we're call it the better way so with that let's jump right in and take a look at both methods of how to move your photos to another Drive to another storage so I'm here on my macbook pro and on my macbook pro I use lighter I have my Lightroom catalogs as a matter of fact I sync them with Dropbox so that way they're on all my computers and but my photos are only like a work in progress in other words the photos that I'm currently doing in a shoot they stay on my MacBook Pros internal hard drive until I'm done with that shoot and then I move them to another drive because I don't know you know I don't have enough room to keep every photo I ever use on the laptops hard drive so at some point they've got to be moved now here are the methods I have two folders that we're gonna move the first one is this folder of 21 images in it called star and I'm gonna do it the way that most people do it the wrong way so I'm going to first of all show me where that folder is on my operating system and let's go to it in the finder all right there's the star folder in the operating system and what people will then do is say oh I probably can't be in Lightroom let me quit out a Lightroom and we'll skip that till next week and then they'll go ahead and they'll just simply find here I am on a on a network volume my server or Nazz if you want to call it that I'm just going to go ahead and move these images over to this drive so I just held down the command key so it moves those images from one drive to the other instead of copying so as you can see it's moving 20 more items to go and in just about a minute here again it is moving that over the network so it takes a couple extra minutes for that to happen but once it's done those images will no longer be in the location where Lightroom thought they were alright just a couple seconds left and boom they've been moved that's it they're no longer in the place where they used to be so now the next time I go on launch lightroom and i have done something outside of lightroom i move them to another location this is what you're gonna get you're gonna get this exclamation point which is a bad thing it says the photo is missing and for each photo in that photo that you highlight it says it's missing because you did it outside of Lightroom Lightroom has no idea what you're doing behind its back or behind the scenes so it says hey you know those photos aren't in the star folder on your second volume of your MacBook Pro I don't know where they are anymore you're gonna have to help me so this method is the way I used to do it because I kind of knew what I was doing but I got a better method that saves for me steps so let's finish this one now not only are the photos missing but they're missing in such a way that I can't do anything until I reconnect them because I did not build smart previews either so if I were to try and take one of these images into the into the develop module it's gonna say the file can't be found and therefore it's gonna lock me out of all editing whatsoever I can't do a thing so let's go in and let's fix the problem we're gonna go ahead and click the exclamation point on the first image notice it's star 2 number 29 and it's going to say hey I can't find star 2 number 29 DNG where is it it gives you the ability to click allocate so I'm gonna go ahead and locate it I know it's out on my file server here there we are and it's in my server folder and it's in the archive photos folder and there it is that's where I just moved it to and it's looking for number 29 there's number 29 now notice this important check box it says I can also find nearby missing photos do you want me to do that and now this core course checked by default yes go ahead and do that for me now this will also kind of throw you off is that once it does that once it reconnects those photos let's go down here in the there we are we're in a server volume now and it knows that they're in the archive photos area and they're in that star photo okay so now it's done that and the photo is no longer missing it knows where it is now and at this point sometimes depending on how you did that it may basically leave you with an empty folder in the old location so you can delete the empty folder and you can go in and just point to the new folder or just you know click on the new folder and you'll see where they are but in this case it didn't do that so I'm just gonna go ahead and continue on and what I'm gonna do is notice they now say original photo so that means I can go in and work on these pictures but one more thing let's select all just in case we ever are disconnected from the server which when I take my laptop out of my home I will be disconnected from the server so if I ever want to work on those photos I'm gonna go up to my library menu come down to previews and I'm gonna build smart previews now what that tells it to do is it builds much smaller preview files than the actual original RAW files and it puts them in the same location as the original as a catalog so therefore even though the images are on the server when I take my laptop away somewhere else I'll have the catalog which is on the laptops hard drive and I'll have the smart previews which is on the laptops hard drive and I can then keep working I don't have to worry about those images are scene and therefore I can't be in the develop module and I'll prove that point in just a moment let's let me build smart previews finish and this by the way can work behind the scenes or but in the background I should say so if you want to continue working go to another folder do other stuff you don't have to wait for the build smart previews to finish you can't that is a process that will happen in the background and you can let it work in the background while you go do other things with other photos or even with the same photos that are selected it doesn't matter alright and that task is now completed and those images have been built now let's quit Lightroom one more time we don't have to quit but I just want to prove the point and I'm gonna unmount the server I'm gonna disconnect from it there it is it's just gone off the desktop now it's gone well watch what happens when I launch Lightroom again let's say I took my laptop away from my home or office and now I'm no longer connected to the server anymore well now it says something else when I select those photos here let's select just one it says that it's a smart preview in other words the original photos not here it's on a drive somewhere else but I still have that smart preview to work with so if I were to go into the develop module I go in the develop module and I have full access to my develop controls I can go in and adjust the contrast I can make it a black and white I can do whatever I want right here and when I reconnect when I get back home and plug in the server or connect to the server again it will apply those changes to the actual original files or to the metadata of the original files depending on how you have Lightroom set up so that will happen no matter what you can work safely offline or away from your original files and when you come back and reconnect it'll apply those changes to the high-res RAW files alright so that was the first method and again that's not the one I usually recommend for people that want to move their files from one drive to the other it does work it's multiple steps it can in some cases be a little faster some cases depending on what your connection is but it did work I could copy them behind the scenes in behind light rooms back and then reconnect them once I got back to Lightroom but why don't we just let Lightroom do all the work force so in this case I've now got an external drive and this external drive has not been used in this copy of Lightroom so I'm gonna go ahead or this catalog I should say I'm gonna go ahead and plug it in it's a thunderbolt hard drive under both slash USB 3 and when I plug it in Lightroom won't do a thing it won't notice it it won't do anything it won't pop up in Lightroom because there are no photos on it that are being managed with Lightroom but let's go take a look at it let's go out here your mat hard drive is made up of three volumes there is a hard drive backup there's a 250 gig and there's an expense or expanse backup so I'm gonna go ahead and put it on the 250 gig volume I'm gonna make a new full actually you know what we'll do it all in Lightroom like I said let's do it so let's go back and now that we're here in Lightroom I'm gonna go ahead and say in the folders area this is how I'm gonna tell Lightroom that that drive exists Lightroom has to see at least one folder on that drive so let's go ahead and say we want to add a folder and it's gonna ask us where where do you want to have that folder now I could point to the external drive I can say that I want to create a new folder called our kyv photos on that drive and the minute I create that folder and click Choose it is now here in Lightroom it's empty but it's here the Lightroom now knows about that drive so at that point I can take my ariana to folder which has 12 images in it 12 RAW files and instead of quitting my room or going behind Lightroom's back and moving stuff behind the scenes I'll let Lightroom do it I'll just simply drag the one folder from my internal drive to that external drive in that folder and look like rooms doing the move for me and it's done so now it knows where those images are I don't have to reconnect anything I don't have to do any extra steps done that's it and because I had built a smart preview for those those are now showing up here so even if I go out to the finder and I disconnect that drive let's eject them all when I come back to Lightroom Lightroom still knows where they were and it says there's a smart preview so you can continue editing until you plug that drive back in once you plug that drive back in you'll be able to just simply or Lightroom will just simply see that it's connected again all your images will be there no more missing or exclamation points and you can just keep working so I hope you've learned in this video how to manage your photos better how to move them from one drive to another you shall saw two methods I prefer the second one and basically just how to keep things together it did not be afraid that Lightroom is going to somehow screw up if images or something's moved now again if you continue to work behind Lightroom's back then yeah there is more chance of something going wrong and things needing to be reconnected manually or in some cases maybe even being lost so that's why I prefer to go ahead and let Lightroom do the managing so that's it take care thanks for watching this episode and we'll catch you on the next one you [Music]

Channel: Scott Kelby

Views: 136,799

Keywords: Adobe Photoshop, Tips, Tutorials, terry white, Lightroom, Adobe PHotoshop Lightroom, Lightroom classic, Lightroom tips, Lighroom tutirials., lightroomkillertips.com

Id: NLXEzsmQAe4

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 04 2018