Moving Your Lightroom Photos To Another Hard Drive (without losing track of any of them)

It's just three really easy steps to make this move happen, and if you follow these steps, Lightroom Classic will keep track of everything so there's no missing images or broken links. Everything works just like it did before, but your images are now on an external drive. Hope you find it helpful.

[ricardopachecoart]

This is how every tutorial on youtube should be. Short and simple, you my friend, are a master.

[bkcampb]

Had to listen to 4 you tubers giving doctoral thesis before I ran across you . Thanks Straight to the point!!!

[seanthompson]

This video was the most helpful you must open a new folder within lightroom for it to work i was opening a folder on my exterrnal no doesnt work must open it within lightroom thanks Scott i have been battling with this for a good few days now. so thank you!

[totesthegoats]

I’ve watched three 15-30min tutorials on catalogs and folders and it only took you less than 3 mins to explain it in a way that I understood 😂 thank you so much 🙏

[timknight]

Just finished doing this and it was so easy….. My photos were taking up 1/2 if ny 1tb hard drive so I was able to move them to a 5 tab external drive and it really didn’t take all that long…. Works great!!!!

[robyncowlanfineartphotogra]

Hey hey Scott - I can not tell you HOW many times I have used this video to help people with their Lightroom whetehr Mac or PC! You are the best!! Been with you since many moons ago NYC.

[lisabokelmann]

Thank you for making my day so much better!

[michaelwalker]

Perfect! Clear and concise! Don't forget to adjust your energy saver settings so your computer doesn't sleep during the process.

[alexforsyth]

Thanks Scott! I wish I had seen this years ago, it would have saved me a lot of problems. Now I am going to buy another external drive and rearrange things and simplify the whole process. I wish all the videos were as good as this one, short and sweet and straight to the point!

[logicmr.]

Thank you for making it short, straight to the point, and easy to understand

[nicholasnichols]

Concise, clear and informative. Fantastic tutorial

[lindaitken]

Do NOT! Do NOT! Do NOT use this method UNLESS you first make sure you have copies (NOT JUST BACKUPS) of the folders you are moving. That note about them being move and not copied is dead serious. If anything goes wrong with the move, you could end up losing files. I had two duplicate external drives - one for the photos and one to be a backup of the first. My pix were kept in folders by year and then subfolders by incident. As a test, I chose a year and moved that folder. When it got to the new drive, only one subfolder had made it to the new drive. No problem - I had the backup file. But when I went to do a restore, I found that the backup file was corrupted. With a backup, everything goes into one file which then needs to be restored with software. If one disk is copied to another, one can look at the second disk and see what's there and if a file is corrupted, that's all that is lost. I'm glad I ran the check on one year; had I tried to move all of them at once, I would have lost about 4 tb of pictures. My solution was to make a copy of the remaining files and THEN use this method. It work the second time. I like the method - it's simple and straight forward. Just make sure you have COPIES of the files you are moving before using it..

[jan_v_ier]

extremely helpful, extremely concise.

[rutaemilija]

I do this once a year and LOVE having something so quick and clear to refresh myself. Thank you!

[rmp]

Trying to collect and organize images from all over. This is just what I needed. Thanks.

[tonycampbell-wdcp]

Thank you for getting to the point and not spending forever talking about useless info. Great instructional video!!!

[RogerJones-mountfield]

You’re a life saver, Scott, thank goodness I’m saved, Bless you 🙏🙏🙏

[beothyphotography]

This was a super helpful tutorial -short and to the point. Thank you!!

[vagnotz]

Thanks! Great tips, making it very simple and immediate

[magnegrimen]

Great tutorial, very easy, very clear and very useful! Thanks! 😀