CAN I CHANGE CATALOG PATH ?

[andrewh69264136]

My  Internal hard drive is low on space, and as my  light room catalog grows in size over time it will out grow the size of my internal hard drive. I have two external hard drives. My question is can I move my existing catalog from my internal to my external with out messing any thing up, and if  so how.

[AxelMatt]

You can move your catalog to an external drive.

Take a look here: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/find-move-rename-catalog/

But it isn't a good idea. LR needs quick access to the catalog and the previews. This is given only on an internal drive.

It's better to change you increase the size of your internal drive. Or you build in a second one.

Axel

[dj_paige]

andrewh69264136  wrote

My  Internal hard drive is low on space, and as my  light room catalog grows in size over time it will out grow the size of my internal hard drive. I have two external hard drives. My question is can I move my existing catalog from my internal to my external with out messing any thing up, and if  so how.

It isn't clear what you want to do. When you say "move the existing catalog", do you mean the catalog file or the photos or both or neither?

In my opinion, the best option to free up space is to move the PHOTOS to the external HD and leave the catalog file itself on the internal drive (as the space it takes is relatively small compared to the space the photos take). If that's what you want to do, move the PHOTOS, this is very simple and is explained in "Part 2 — Updating Folder Location" of this document: Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders

[Just Shoot Me]

The actual Catalog file is usually very small compared to the size of all the image files imported into the catalog file. I have some 250 GBs of image files imported and the catalog file is only 320+ MBs. Moving the catalog file would not free up much space on the drive it is currently located on. Moving the image files would free up over 250 GBs.