Lightroom Quick Tips - Episode 5: Move Lightroom Library to an External Drive

This is the fifth episode of a new series where I give a single, quick Lightroom tip.

Often, when we begin to use Lightroom we have our Lightroom Library on the local drive of our computer. Before long, it may swell with thousands of images and take up too much space. In this video I show how you can easily move your entire Lightroom Library to an external hard drive and preserve all the edits that you've previously done.

[mje]

Hey, Anthony. Thanks for the video. I found it extremely helpful. However, for those who may not know LR that well, it would have been helpful to see a demonstration using an actual external drive to show how to trick LR into recognizing it rather than using your internal drive. Saying you're using your internal/local drive to demonstrate how to set up an external drive could get confusing for some folks.

[thechriskendall]

How some people manage to make this simple task a 15 minute video, I have no idea! Thanks for the concise explanation! 🙏

[Criistii]

Thanks for the video. Actually helped a lot. Especially the part about importing a random photo.

[shelleyburnett]

Thank you! I'm a recent LR transplant from Aperture, so I'm trying to learn all the work arounds. I desperately needed to transfer things pronto so I could load more sessions. Thank you for this easy-to-follow tutorial!

[barbaraaltevers]

Once again you have helped me with a problem with my PS CC. I really appreciate the videos you do.

[woofbarkyap]

I've just switched from Aperture. It's a steep learning curve so thank you for your excellent tutorials!
What's still puzzling me is how to upload from my card reader straight to my external drive and have Lightroom work from that, without having to store any at all on my main machine. Not sure if that makes sense!

[alexskoz]

Man this guy is great & Easy to understand!  Highly Recommended !

[WillNGo]

Thank you. At 3:10 is one of the main areas of Lightroom Fails. I've been using Lightroom for 13 years. It's an endless hassle finding drives and folders. LR seems to love to compartmentalize compartments ad infinitum. It's folder tree never seems to look like my Finder (Mac). Lightroom doesn't seem to have an alias option, or a create your own list option (key words mostly do this.... but keywords are essentially nouns, maybe there should be a layer of proper nouns, those key words we don't always remember the same way: Sailing or Boats? Hiking or Trekking? Color dots, flags etc... are useful, but after marking images 4&5 for the ones to tweak and submit and X-delete, everything else we do with these things is ad hoc (meaning the color dots and flags usually mean something today for this group, but next month will mean something different).
My other perennial beef is "Do you want to search for this missing image? and it shows the 15 digit file number. When you select Yes. It gives you a blank finder box: 'okay chump, how much of that 15 digit number do you think you can remember?' "We could tell you the name of the hard drive or folder we last found it ha! that might make it easier or possible....
Good information Anthony, I had a little trouble following the last part....
Tip for guys like me. Don't get it? Want to get it? for books, it's read it again. Is it really useful information and dense? Then read it a third time. For YouTube I try to find 2-3 videos on the same specific tip, then watch them, try it, make notes, try it again... Many times it will boil down to writing down the time code for that tricky bit so you can repeatedly go over it until it clicks. A pretty good YouTube video-like this one-watched multiple times really helps.

[aaronslens]

Wow! I've been wanting to do this FOREVER but I didn't know how or who to ask! Thanks so much!

[larrymarx]

This one is very useful. I just bought a new external hard drive.

[elenaseaton]

THANK YOU SO MUCH I THINK THIS MAY HAVE ACTUALLY SAVED MY LIFE

[bobzhang]

Thank you so much, your video help me a lot!

[kahlad]

Thank you for this video! I've tried to do exactly as you've shown, and I always get a message that says "the folder named * contains your lightroom catalogue and cannot be moved while Lightroom is running." HELP! How do I get around this? I have zero space left on my computer and can't seem to move anything without losing photos. Literally the ONLY thing on my hard drive is my lightroom catalogue. How can I move it?

[suncountryairline]

Anthony Morganti You have the best Lightroom tutorials on YouTube. I have learned alot from you!

I have a question:
First a little background on my computer setup. I have a Macbook pro laptop and a Windows 8 desktop. I store my photos on an external usb hard drive and do my editing on my laptop. I am using a NAS storage device on my network and have lightroom backup my catalog to it. It is my understanding Lightroom doesn't backup your photos. It just backs up the changes you have done to the photos. What would you suggest that would automatically backup those photos from the external drive. I can't seem to get TimeMachine to also backup the external drive to the NAS.

[leonardwertheimer]

I have been thinking about moving my photos from my internal hard drive, and BINGO you tell me how to do it.  Thanks.

[bennykanny]

Thanks for the video..but how do you just copy the folders to a new extremal drive?

[lwan]

when I move the files to a different location, it always give me a warning:
Moving Files on Disk
This will cause the corresponding files on disk to be moved. If you proceed, neither this move nor any change you've made prior to this can be undone.

[elexigenteusa]

Anthony, thank you for your excellent explanations, they are great! Would please, explain how to copy photos using Lightroom to an external drive. thanks

[peninnahmathew]

Hey can you give more of editing tips like refining, bringing out colour and how to make our preset editings- in these quicktip videos? Thanks.

[simracer]

Hi Anthony. Did you find any performance reduction when you moved the library to an external drive? I am thinking of looking at doing this so that I can easily do backups with a drobo or something similar. Do you have any thoughts?

I love your videos. Extremely professional effort and you deserve to win awards!