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Hi, my name is John Gallagher, I'm trying to help out a friend who has lightroom installed on his PC.
He's got an external hard drive with all his photos on, so he wants to copy them from the external to the laptop and then import from where he saved them (i think it's the desktop).
I helped him on the phone with some basic copying and pasting, it sounded like he worked out a way to import the files from the desktop and then to clear up space he deleted the files from the desktop (i'm not sure it that was right) because lightroom has now made a link to the desktop, is that right?
Now he re copiied the files from the external after deleting them and he tried importing them and he's been having problems. Now when he inserts his external hard drive lightroom reads the photos from the external hard drive and not from the desktop.
Would anyone know what might have gone wrong there? Thank you
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There is no need to re-import. If the image files have been added to a permanent folder e.g. Pictures or My Pictures simply re-link to the existing location. Right-click on the desktop folder in the LR Library and choose “Update Folder Location” Then navigate to the folder containing the files. LR should automatically update the links.
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Thank you for that, I will try and let you know if that has worked, thanks.
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So let me get this straight.
The photos were copied from external to laptop, imported into Lightroom, deleted from desktop, copied from external and he wants to import again?
This is an very cumbersome and problem prone workflow. Start over. Make a new catalog, in Lightroom use File->New Catalog. Import the photos from the external HD using the ADD option in the Import dialog box. That's it, no moving, no copying, no deleting. It can't be any simpler.
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With photo file sizes being what they are with the newer DSLRs, you can quickly use up your internal hard drive's space with images. Not sure how many images are being copied from the external to your friend's local drive but you may want to consider the implications that will have over the long run. Filling up your local drive can slow it down and if there is ever a hard drive crash, you might not be able to recover lost files.
You didn't mention why the images are being copied from the external to the internal drive. Is this a temporary fix to a failing external drive? These days with the cost of externals being reasonable I would recommend replacing the external with a new larger storage device that will last for some time. Keep the older external as an archive. Consider that new drive as a Main Photo Drive and go from there.