How to get your Lightroom Catalog onto an External Hard Drive
I posted an article recently about my photo storage system. In my article, I talk about the tremendous advantages you get from storing all of your digital images, and your Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog files, on an external hard drive. Today’s tutorial video is on how I get those Lightroom Catalog files over to my external disk.
This process of moving an existing Catalog, or creating a brand new Catalog, on an external drive is one of the very first things that we do in my Lightroom workshops. I know that this process is not one of the most interesting part of digital photography, but I truly believe that the long-term benefits are worth the extra hassle.
The very first time that you launch Lightroom, it creates a folder for your catalog files inside of your “Pictures” or “My Pictures” folder.
Windows:
[User]/My Documents/My Pictures (except in Vista where they just call it Pictures)
Mac
[User]/Pictures
By default, the program names this folder “Lightroom” and automatically creates its own file for your image previews and a separate file for your catalog information. Think of this entire “Lightroom” folder as the card catalog, or as the central index, for your image library. This is great but I want this folder and all of its components over on my external hard drive. Hopefully, this tutorial video will show you just how easy it is to move your Lightroom Catalog folder from one drive to another. There is even a bonus trick in this video for folks who have never launched the program. (Hint: hold down the ALT key when launching the application for the very first time to change its default folder.)
Putting the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog onto an External Hard Drive from David Marx on Vimeo.
Update: The article, and video, on how to move your images from one drive to another is finally up. Its really the second part of this tutorial.
Filed Under: FAQ • Getting Started • Tips • Tutorials • Workflow
About the Author: David Marx has an extensive knowledge of digital photography and is an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop and in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. David is a talented instructor and his entertaining teaching style works for students of all skill levels. He has been teaching digital photography and image enhancement with Adobe Photoshop since 2002. In addition, David’s sports and landscape images are often featured on the web and in outdoor sports publications.
In 2009, David Marx led digital photography programs for the 
“…Using a striped disk for speed + a mirrored disk for on-site backup seems like the best of both world’s to me without the expense or complexity of the RAID 5 setup. I would love to hear thoughts and comments though from others out there….”
- David
David:
I really have to focus my aging brain to think through the all options for purchasing, setting up and configuring hard drives and RAID enclosures to create a reliable and trustworthy workflow. Moving between notebook and a desktop really complicates it all. This planning process is a real brain tease and I for one never quite feel like I’m making the correct decisions. Your writing on this topic is invaluable to photographers learning to “connect the dots” between workflow concepts and actual hardware configurations.
I’m finally about to move my own Lightroom Catalog from an internal, 750GB Mac Pro drive to an existing Mercury Elite Pro AL DualDrive (FW800/400/USB2) with two 750GB (ATA100) drives formatted with SoftRAID 4.0 as RAID 5 (mirrored). Since this is not a hardware RAID — nor eSATA — it would not make for the fastest system, but it would be portable, and (I think) more reliable than a single drive or a striped solution. I feel the Mercury Elite pro AL enclosures with SoftRAID have been relatively reliable — I’ve used this unit since 2007 for image storage (and I do have a cold spare 750GB drive on the shelf for this unit). However, this unit does not have a power cord that locks into place (a real design oversight) and I did kick the power cord loose once, and had to nervously wait for the software to rebuild the secondary disk.
My more unique portable catalog experiment is possible because I’ve just added an 8TB Mercury Elite Pro AL Qx2 RAID with eSATA for image storage, and so I could move my image files from the old RAID to the new eSATA RAID and try my Catalog RAID idea. By the way, my new eSATA RAID unit is formatted as RAID 5 (three drives and a hot spare which makes it a 4TB unit), and I also have a cold spare 2TB drive on the shelf as well).
If my 2009 MacBook Pro only had an external eSATA port, I’d get a new, faster portable RAID for the the catalog. FYI: I shoot Nikon D3s (11.2MB RAW files) with a D1x backup and typically start out on trips with about 250GB of disk space free on the MacBook Pro. If my math is correct, that’s probably enough internal drive space for about 2200 RAW files — and several days of heavy shooting, even with no DVD offloads. Now, put me into a D3x, a Hasselblad with 39MB files or HD movies and storage tightens up.
My follow-up questions:
1. Do you think I’m daft to consider this Catalog RAID idea? Will the catalog performance be fast enough?
2. I still haven’t “connected the dots” about some aspects of the workflow — how I handle adding the image files to the main studio storage drive (the Qx2 RAID) when I come back in from the field. And if my Lightroom Catalog will be on this portable drive, should I also temporarily cramming my images on this external while in the field (as opposed to storing them on my MacBook Pro (8GB/500GB/7200rpm)? Or perhaps I also could temporarily back up image files to the portable RAID…
Hello David,
Did you ever make the next movie that you mention at the end of this one? The best way to move images from a “working” catalog on my computer, to an “archive” catalog on an external drive is what I am looking for.
Cheers,
Dan
Dear Dan,
Two articles / movie that might interest you. See http://thelightroomlab.com/2008/11/reader-question-moving-images-from-one-computer-to-another/ and http://thelightroomlab.com/2010/06/importing-and-moving-files-from-your-internal-hard-drive-to-an-external-disk-with-adobe-photoshop-lightroom-3/.
If you have more questions please write us back.
–
David
Hi David,
I have been using LR 2 for about a year now and have a significant amount of images in use on the program. I have an external hard drive that I would now like to use to try and preserve my computers hard drive space. I have had trouble finding your video for importing to an external hard drive for people who have already been using LR extensively. Could you please provide me with the link or send some information my way.
Thanks in advance,
Peter