Comments on: Moving a Lightroom Catalog

By: PI

PI — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:17:41 +0000

I can just second Layo on this.

I recently moved my entire image collection with the standard Move command in Windows, and also changed the name of the top folder. After opening up the catalog files in Lightroom from the new location, just right click on the top folder, choose “Update folder location” and point it to the new top folder. LR will then find all your subfolders and files, with all data intact.

By: Layo

Layo — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:56:24 +0000

I don’t get why it has to be so complicated…I just move the folders to another drive and then use the “Update Folder Location” function.

It keeps all my edit history an everything. I had to do this when my few hundred gigs of raw files outgrew my computer’s internal hard drive and migrated over to my Drobo.

Am I missing something?

By: vasi

vasi — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:01:42 +0000

it’s in work as I type this. One puzzle though, LR shows Storage (E:) and yet the only lists the folder name that has the image files, however, the new Drive, Drobo, although shown, under it is the file entire folder structure. I like to have the structure instead of random folders, but how do I not have it show the entire structure under the new drive?

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:12:07 +0000

I just returned from a vacation trip and need to transfer my photos from a laptop to my desktop computer. I did not take a separate external hard drive, so my photos are currently on the laptop hard drive. I used Lightroom to process them while away and now want to add to my permanent catalog. Are steps outlined above the ones to follow? Seems pretty cumbersome.

By: Dmitry

Dmitry — Fri, 29 May 2009 07:01:53 +0000

I would agree with UncleSam. The only thing he didn’t mention that you can move your photos to a new place (really any place, not necessary the same where you put a new catalog) and after opening the new catalog you just need to do ‘Update Folder Location’. All your develop history will be there. I did it several times and moved photos from MAC drive to PC drive (external/internal) and vice versa.

By: Eden Connell

Eden Connell — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:09:41 +0000

Hi Guys,

I’m going o/s and taking a laptop with me with a 160GB drive I want to backup everything from up until the start of my trip and keep this at home…. then want to start a new Lightroom catalogue for my o/s photos… when I come back I want to compile them… Does anyone have any ideas how to do this?

By: JohnC

JohnC — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:41:47 +0000

Re: External Drive letters issue
I get round this problem by assigning a high drive letter to my external drive (say p:) then every time it is plugged in it gets the same drive letter.

By: Fin C

Fin C — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:33:32 +0000

Yikes! This is an ugly mess Adobe have left for us, no? You’d think they would have foreseen this eventuality and built it into their program. After all, this program is supposed to specialise in providing a fast workflow.

Many thanks for this post though, i’ve saved it in a text file for that dreaded day when I need to move my Lightroom catalogue!

By: Kang

Kang — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:58:14 +0000

I was just doing a transfer of my LR files from my mac’s HD to an external HD for storage. Yeah, I have to agree with Steven that the problem with LR is if you want to to a selective back-up, you need to drag one sub-folder at a time, clearly Adobe still have alot of fine tuning to do with this respect. Though the good thing about LR is that the ‘off-line’ files can still be accessed and viewed as a lower res photo even when the actual LR database on the external HD is disconnected.

By: UncleSam

UncleSam — Wed, 27 May 2009 05:34:16 +0000

I don’t quite understand the necessity to perform a long list of steps instead of one, just exporting photos as catalog. The specific of my work presumes that I often edit my shots on two or thre different computers where my flash drive mounts at different letters (at one of them I am not even an amin, so I can’t change the drive leter). All I do is create a catalog at one of them, then export is as catalog either directly to a flash-drive (it should be quite fast, to allow read speed comparable to Lightroom speed), or copy it there after export. Then I use the catalog fole (.lrcat) to open Lightroom, and that’s it. Even with the drive letter change Lightroom finds everything you need, save as for one issue of not finding the original in the beginning, but when you click on a next photo and then back, everything turns ok.

The same is with copying this catalog to the Desktop or whatever and editing it over there, but much slower. So, youo don’t need this boring stuff described above.