Catalogue images don't show without locating manually from my external HD

[vincentcroce]

Hi there,

I use external hard drives to store my photos. Works pretty well for me.

The only (big) downside is that everytime I restart my laptop, the Drive location changes automatically (from :F to :H or from :G to :I for example). That way, LR doesn't find my images in the catalogue anymore.

Does anybody have any tips?

Cheers, Vincent

[JP Hess · Accepted solution]

You need to assign the external drive a letter further down in the alphabet. For instance, my external drives are assigned drive X and Z. That way they will always be recognized with those letters. You don't have to go that low in the alphabet, but that is what is causing your problem. After you reassign the letter, when you start Lightroom all of your images are going to be missing. It isn't a big problem, however. Just go to the library module. If you have your folders arranged within one master folder just go to the master folder and right-click and choose the option to update the folder location. In the dialog that appears just point Lightroom to the location on the external drive with its new letter designation. If you have multiple folder locations you'll have to repeat that process for each folder.

[vincentcroce]

Thanks a lot for your help Jim!

Could you also tell me how to reassign my external drives? 

Thanks again!

V

[Michael J. Hoffman]

Hi Vincent,

This may help with assigning drive letters:

How to assign a drive letter in Windows 10 - TechRepublic

Mike

[Abambo]

Just to add my 5 cents here:

During start-up, windows assigns all internal drives (and partitions, if you have partitioned your drives) letters starting from C: for the boot drive to the end of the number of drives connected. A and B are left out, they are reserved for your floppy disks (and well, due to technological advanced, you will have problems buying a computer with floppies still built in...).

If you have external drives/USB sticks/Card readers, those get also assigned letters if they are plugged in during start-up or when they get plugged-in. The problem here is, when you have a drive that has been assigned the letter H:, and the next time it gets plugged-in, the OS will again attribute the letter H: except if H: is taken. Then there will be a new letter assigned to that drive.

This is highly disturbing as you can not make sure that the letter you want a specific drive to have is correctly assigned. The only way to ensure that the drive letters probably do not change is attributing voluntarily higher letters in the alphabet to those drives where you do not want the letter to change.

So, if you have a couple of external drives, where you want the letters to stay the same, allocate high order letters, starting at Z and going down, making sure you do not collide.

I also tried to recycle A: and B: drive letters, but I refrained from using them as there are still programs/parts of the OS considering A: and B: as not attributable to anything else than floppy drives.

[vincentcroce]

This helps a lot. Thanks for the comprehensive feedback.

I'll try to rename my drives now.

Have a nice day!

Vincent