Lightroom CC doesn't recognise my external harddrive

[LeonelP.]

Hey guys,

So, I have spent hours now trying to figure how to migrate my catalog from Lightroom classic to Lightroom CC

First, my catalogs are saved on the local hard drive of my laptop and the original photos are saved on an external hard drive in order to save space on my laptop.

The issue is, following the instructions on the website, I need to set the Local Storage > Originals Are Currently Stored In A Custom Location and select the hard drive where the originals are but when I do the Lightroom CC doesn't recognize the external hard drive as the "location". it prompts an error "Oops! You've selected an invalid location."

Any advice? or work around? I'm not super technical and I'm getting frustrated with this. Also, According to the web, it says that when we are migrating the catalog, lightroom cc makes ANOTHER copy of the original photos and then sync them to the cloud so I need to have space for all that drama; is there a workaround for this too? I do not count with that enormous amount of space. My originals are less than 1 TB, my external hard drive IS 1 TB space but my laptop is 250 GB (Apple, you know). 

[Jao vdL]

leonel85  wrote

Any advice? or work around? I'm not super technical and I'm getting frustrated with this. Also, According to the web, it says that when we are migrating the catalog, lightroom cc makes ANOTHER copy of the original photos and then sync them to the cloud so I need to have space for all that drama; is there a workaround for this too? I do not count with that enormous amount of space. My originals are less than 1 TB, my external hard drive IS 1 TB space but my laptop is 250 GB (Apple, you know).

I don't know why you're getting that error. It should work without problem especially if you are using a Mac where you don't have drive letter problems that can change sometimes. However:

>so I need to have space for all that drama; is there a workaround for this too?

The only workaround for this if you have too small of an internal drive is to migrate the catalog piece by piece by exporting small subcatalogs from your Lightroom Classic catalog or to increase your internal hard disk's size.

>My originals are less than 1 TB, my external hard drive IS 1 TB space but my laptop is 250 GB (Apple, you know).

Many Apple laptops' SSD can be upgraded even if Apple says it can't. Best upgrade I ever did on my 2012 MacBook Pro that had a 256 GB SSD in it that was getting way too small was a 1TB SSD. Not hard to install especially just following the videos. A helpful site to find out if this can be done on your machine is Apple Mac Upgrades - RAM, SSD Flash, External Drives and More. ​ Click on My upgrades and find your machine to see if it can be done. Amazon also sells several different brands of these.

[LeonelP.]

Thank you so much!

Im going to have a look and hope it work. Also I think I should do some “cleaning” on my external hard drive.

Also i had a look on the link you provide, very interesting. I’m gojng to dig a bit deeper and order one.

for now, going to try your solution and divide the catalogs In parts. Hope that works.

Have one one last question tho... before lighroom CC and all this cloud magic (Which I will love more once I figured it out), you could select which “collections“ you wanted to sync on all your devices in order to save memory space. Now it appears that ALL my collections have being sync and every device and there’s no possibility to select the collections you actually want on your novile decives. Is there a workaround for this too?

I mean I get it, you’re saving your originals  to the cloud and suppose to help you organize them but I find it weird that you can not select which collections to sync, specially since I don’t NEED all my collections everywhere.

Hope i explain myself

[Jao vdL · Accepted solution]

Have one one last question tho... before lighroom CC and all this cloud magic (Which I will love more once I figured it out), you could select which “collections“ you wanted to sync on all your devices in order to save memory space. Now it appears that ALL my collections have being sync and every device and there’s no possibility to select the collections you actually want on your novile decives. Is there a workaround for this too?

Lightroom CC cannot selectively sync certain albums/collections. If you want that feature you should look into Lightroom Classic, which is the update to Lightroom CC 2015 and is the Lightroom you remember. Lightroom Classic like the older version of Lightroom only syncs smart previews to the cloud but that is usually enough to work with them on mobile platforms. I hear selective sync is high on the requested features list for Lightroom CC (the new cloud app) but that might take a while to materialize as it is so different from the philosophy behind Lightroom CC where everything, including your catalog is in the cloud. With Lightroom Classic, your main catalog is still local.

[tonyw14269954]

this is my issue too. LR CC will not see my drive for storage.