2 Replies Latest reply: Aug 10, 2013 8:07 PM by BKKDon RSS

    DON'T USE LIGHTROOM TO MOVE PHOTOS!!!

    d@v!dm Community Member

      I recently got a new external hard drive to move my photo library onto b/c I was running out of space for my 10,000+ (RAW) photos. So I do it the "right way" which is to move the folders within lightroom so that lightroom knows about the move and none of the photos get "lost".

       

      Well this was just a terrible idea because somewhere about 3/4 of the way through moving the almost 300GB of photos, lightroom crashes my computer HARD. This is the worst crash I've ever seen on my mac, pretty incredible, no kernel panic message, just a complete freeze, even the mouse. I was listening to music in the background and it started repeating like a broken record (I gues the audio card just kept playing the last data that was sent to it's buffer over and over again). This is pretty dang impressive given the fact that mac os uses a microkernel architecture that is supposed to be imperveous to missbehaving user land programs.

       

      Now everything is completely screwed. Lightroom thinks that some of my files are still in the old location but it actually had already moved them. Some files have been copied to the new location, but had not been yet removed from the old location, some photos it now thinks are missing, it's just s complete mess. Fortunately I didn't loose any actual photo data, but it took hours to clean up the mess manually, and finish copying the photos.

       

      Moral of the story: just copy the files with the OS and then point lightroom to the new location when it complains that photos are missing (this method is probably faster anway).

        • 1. Re: DON'T USE LIGHTROOM TO MOVE PHOTOS!!!
          web-weaver Community Member

          There have been reports similar to yours over the years - maybe half a dozen, or so.

          Some of these occurrences might be due to "operator error" - although reading your post, I don't think "operator error" applies in your case.

          I remember Adobe answering to one of these posts saying that they take such reports seriously, that they tried to reproduce this behavior but could not, although - as they said - they threw everything they could think of at it.

          As far as I remember all of the reported incidences occurred when large-ish amounts of images were moved in one fell swoop, i.e. image folders, parent folders, or whole drives.

           

          I would advise anybody wanting to move image folders, parent (image) folders , or whole drives to a new location (a new external drive for instance) to do this via your OS and re-link in Lr.

          It is advisable that on each of the drives you have one (1) parent folder for all image folders on this drive, i.e. each image folder is a sub-folder (or a sub-sub folder, etc) of this one parent folder.

          All what you have to do is move this parent folder (with all its sub-folders) via your OS and then in Lr you have to re-link only the parent folder. Lr will find the sub-folders on its own, provided that on the occasion of moving the parent folder you do not change the folder structure or the folder names.

          But if you do not have this one parent folder presently, I would advise against creating it in Lr because this might just incur what you never want to happen.

           

          BTW: One very recent poster found his/her images in the Trash Can.

          • 2. Re: DON'T USE LIGHTROOM TO MOVE PHOTOS!!!
            BKKDon Community Member

            I also had the same problem on Win 7 x64 but the issue here was that it didn't remember moving all of the photos even though they were moved on disk so I had to delete the directory, wind back the catalog and copy the files using the OS then re-link the parent folder.

             

            I concur .... use the OS!