Learn How to Safely Move Your Lightroom Catalog
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- čas přidán 11. 07. 2024
- Laura Shoe (www.laurashoe.com) shows you how to move (and rename) your Lightroom catalog. Please show your support: subscribe to Laura's CZcams channel!
Move your catalog to a different hard drive, a different location on the same drive, or to a different computer. Use your Lightroom catalog with two or more computers.
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Just found about your channel when I needed the guidance this video gives. Great video! Answered all my questions. Superb content. Thank you!
I was just making sure I've been doing it right for the past decade, but I watched the whole video because I love your voice!
Easy to follow and great tips. Thank you !!
awesome and so helpful! Thank you.
Thank you for this video. Excellent explanation.
Job done! thanks Laura👍
Very helpful - thank you!
Thank you! Very helpful and clear
Thanks very much Laura, this was a really useful tutorial. All set up and working.
You're welcome, Alan - good to hear!
Great explanation as usual, Laura. Many thanks.
You're welcome, Paul!
Excellent video. So clear and to the point. Well done!
I'm glad it was helpful, Barbara!
Thank you!
Thank you so Much!
Very helpfully explained. Took the fear out of doing it. Many thanks
You're welcome, Ian - I'm happy to hear it.
Great! Thanks!
You are a wonderful woman, thank you!
You're welcome, Simon - and thank you!
Very useful thank you!
You're welcome, Timor!
Adding the skipping instructions is a touch of genius :) Thanks a lot and I hope your voice is back to normal!
You're welcome, Robert, and thank you!
Hello Laura. Great video. After viewing many you tube videos on how to move your catalog, yours was the only one that was clear cut and easy to follow. I work for 6 months at a crack at two different locations so it was important to put my catalog on my external drive and work that way. I'm in my second location and plugged in my external drive went to finder found it and open LR from that. What I have found is this. I set my folders up by shoot. Date & location. Then within that folder I have a sub-folder that I name "in Progress". From LR I move all the photos for that shoot into the "In Progress" folder. Then as I post process the photos I move them from LR into the main folder. This way as I stroll through my work I can always look at the photos I am done with and the rest stay in the "In progress" until I have processed them. After opening the catalog from finder now both the main folder and the "in progress" have the same photos in it. The main folder has my edited photos, but all the "in Progress as well". So there are duplicates. What should I do? Completely confused now. Thanks in advance for all your help.
Hi Katie, one of the Lightroom forums (lightroomqueen.com or community.adobe.com) would be a better place to get assistance, unless you have my latest video series (laurashoe.com/learn), in which case you can contact us to join my Facebook group. (That said, I'm on sabbatical, so the group is currently members helping members, for the most part.)
WOW i have a LR nightmare. Multiple duplicates of my catalog in different folders with different backups, and absolutely massive previews file taking up half my computer and tons of .lrcat-wal files even after closing. I tried moving and renaming my catalog which seemed to absolutely confuse lightroom and myself even more. Finally, took the random newer catalog that seemed to be up-to-date and copied it to an external harddrive. Launched LR with the new copy and double checked that everything seemed up-to-date and closed/backed up LR. Everything seems to be running fine and I have told LR to open from that specific catalog now. Hopefully I can now delete all that other crap of 250GB without any issues and have a fresh start. Thanks for this informative video! Very helpful to make sure I'm taking the right steps.
YW, Anthony - I'm glad it was helpful! Lightroom nightmares can best be cleaned up and then avoided with my Lightroom Fundamentals & Beyond series (laurashoe.com/learn) .
Thanks
You're welcome, Messala!
hi Laura
I currently use a laptop and i have the main catalogue, and backups, and images on the external SSD.
I'm soon getting a desktop PC which i want to use most of the time, and sometimes use the laptop with the same catalogue
What i want to do though is transfer the main catalogue from the external SSD to the new desktop PC for better performance, while keeping the images on the external SSD, along with the backups of the catalogue, but also occasionally use the external SSD on the laptop.
Is this possible to do or even beneficial?
I prefer not to store the images on the desktop nor the laptop
You used Disk Manager to fix drive letter on Windows XP, and still do on Windows 11.
Once I have moved my catalogue to an external drive, I think I will just open it from Explorer. If LrC is set to open last catalogue, and I saw yours was, then it will want the external one next time
If there is non on the internal drive, there's no likelihood of LrC opening it.
An alternative way to fix the drive letter:
net use P: e:\2023\Pictures
It stays until you delete it for next year. Be away, LrC will get upset if you use a different drive or path top open the catalog, it won't find the pictures.
The catalogue is an SQLite database, I intend to explore it more closely some time.
good video. When I got to the step where I was trying to change the preference on where it opens, I selected the external hard drive but I see no ok button. Please help
I'm glad you found it helpful, @Fosc. Just close Preferences.
Great tutorial :). One thing I am not sure of is how come my Collections are still displaying the cannot locate file message?? How do I fix that?
The images as shown in collections are the same images as shown in folders, so they should display the same info. Also, moving your Lightroom catalog shouldn't affect whether your images are missing. I may have a video here on YT on Missing Files and Folders that explains how this happens and how to fix it. Otherwise it's in my Lightroom Fundamentals & Beyond video series (which I'd highly recommend, not just because I made it ;-) laurashoe.com/learn
@@LauraShoe1 I agree. They should be the same, except they are not! They all display an exclamation mark! Can't figure out why?
Is rhis the same safe process for the current versions of Lightroom Classic CC (2021)? I might even be missing an update, maybe even two. BTW, I'm running Windows 10, in case that makes a difference.
Yes, it's the same, Carolyn. (That said, there's an updated video in my Lightroom Fundamentals & Beyond series (laurashoe.com/learn)
@@LauraShoe1 Thanks! I appreciate your quick reply. 🙂
Hello Laura. I have followed these steps and have moved everything to a new external hard drive. Everything looks similar to your but when I launch Lightroom from the new location I am still not able to direct it to my photos folder. I tried "finding missing files" and managed to connect 300 but I have over 30,000 photos to find. Not sure what step I must be missing. I moved all of the photos with Finder on Mac.
Hi Judi, this video covers how to move a LR catalog, not photos - they are two separate processes. Moving photos outside of Lightroom using Mac Finder indeed will lead to missing photos since Lightroom can't see you do that move and now doesn't know where they are. You now need to do the Find Missing Folder process on your highest level folder, so that you can resolve that and all the subfolders all at once (assuming your photo folders are all in a master folder). Look for my video on missing files and folders. For further assistance please post in one of the forums - community.adobe.com or lightroomqueen.com. (For complete instruction, check out my Lightroom Fundamentals & Beyond series, for experienced users as well as beginners, at laurashoe.com/learn .)
I have my Catalog and photos on an external hard drive. My biggest concern is if I have an issue with the external drive, how would I gain access to my catalog and photos? I am a new user.
That's a great question, Suzanne - one I wish more people would ask. Both internal and external hard drives can crash, so it's very important that you back up both. Get a large backup external drive and use Time Machine on Mac, Windows File History on PC, or a third party backup program. Be absolutely sure to configure it to back up both your internal and external drive. Also, since that backup only serves to protect you against hard drive failure and doesn't protect you from fire, flood, theft, etc., also get a cloud backup service - I like Backblaze, but there are other good ones too.
You mentioned you are a beginner, Suzanne. I would recommend that you check out my Lightroom Fundamentals & Beyond video series (laurashoe.com/learn) - it discusses this and much, much more, and will help you avoid the mistakes and messes that many Lightroom Classic users end up with because they didn't understand how it works well enough. The feedback I most commonly get is "I wish I had come across this years ago!)
OMG, 18 minutes to explain these very simple three steps. I found a guy do this for 0:36 sec video. I know that women can talk a lot but...
18 mins for a simple tutorial??? no thanks
Very, very helpful! Thank you!
You're welcome, Joshua - good to hear!
Really helpful ! Thanks a lot !