"Archiving" to external drive

[rkstiensthisisbs]

The directory with my photos id getting very large and I would like to move some of my pictures to an external drive.   How do I do that and still keep everything in Lightroom?

[Mohit Goyal · Accepted solution]

Hi rkstiensthisisbs,

You can  simply copy the images to external driver in the same folder structure and then open Lightroom and update the folder location there also.

Refer the below tutorials.

How to find missing photos in Photoshop Lightroom

How to create and manage folders in Photoshop Lightroom

Regards,

Mohit

[ManiacJoe]

Mohit has you pointed in the right direction.

The catch to this is that you need to use your OS tools Finder or Explorer to do the copy to the new disk, not do it in Lightroom.

[dj_paige]

You probably also don't want to do this as a regular thing when your internal disk fills up. You want to import the photos directly to the external drive, rather than putting them on the internal drive and later put them on the external drive; this saves you some work in the future.

[cmgap]

Since you want these images to remain in your catalog make sure you have smart previews of those that you may want to work on in the future. Smart previews will allow you to continue to work on the images even when the external drive isn't connected.

This article from By Dan Moughamian at Adobe Press is a quick read and good information.

Creating and Using Smart Previews > Developing Raw Files with Lightroom 5 Smart Previews

You can also create and sync collections so that you can access them through Lr Mobile and a browser.

How to sync Lightroom desktop and the Lightroom mobile app