Export preview of complete catalog?

[Guest]

I'm just working on migrating all my photos older than 3 years to a backed upp but offline storage. It will save me space but makes of course searching harder the few times per year I need to search for an old photo.

I got one idea to export a web gallery with thumbnails of all old photos (or maybe one per year). I would like to include descriptions, tags etc.

Are there any such tools? One idea is to make a custom web gallery and just export that.

If I can find anything like that I can just check out that image from my vault.

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

olalind  wrote

I'm just working on migrating all my photos older than 3 years to a backed upp but offline storage. It will save me space but makes of course searching harder the few times per year I need to search for an old photo.

No, it should not make searching harder if you do it right.

The photos that are migrated to offline storage should remain in your LR catalog. DO NOT REMOVE THE PHOTOS FROM LIGHTROOM'S CATALOG!!! Since the storage is offline, they will show in the Library module with an exclamation point indicating that Lightroom cannot find the photo, but you can still search in LR for photos with given keyword (or other metadata). Once the storage becomes on-line, LR will recognize this and the exclamation point icon will go away.

By the way, external HDs are relatively inexpensive and don't really have to be taken off-line, you can leave them plugged in.

Lastly, migrating photos is not the same as making backups!!! Don't confuse the two.

[Guest]

Thank you so much. Of course that's how people do. I hadn't realized that I could use Lightroom with many photos with broken links. But of course. Then all metadata + edits will remain.

Thanks again!