There are three parts to the Lightroom – Image equation: the application (Mac) / executable file (PC), your Lightroom Catalog files, and your images. Moving the Catalog and / or your Images from drive to drive is fine. Moving these parts to a faster drive or one with a faster rotational speed may boost overall performance. Moving the application and its related files away from your startup drive though is not recommended. See http://thelightroomlab.com/2011/03/where-should-i-keep-my-adobe-photoshop-lightroom-catalog/ for more on where to store your Catalog and your Images.

–
David Marx

I have sort of tried the same on my PC. I just ‘copied’ the entire ‘Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.4′ directory (found under program files/adobe) to the same drive as the catalogue and files etc (both internal). Amazingly Lightroom still runs when started from this new location unfortunately I don’t get an order of magnitude improvement but there is certainly some improvement.

Any ideas why there is the performance improvement?

Lots of Windows users are reporting troubles with the Lightroom 3.2 update. Reinstaliing 2.7 is a good solution but I would have gone for the Lightroom 3.0 installer that you purchased when you bought the software. This installer is either on your Lightroom 3 CD or available for download from your account at Adobe.

For real help with this issue though you need to get in touch with Adobe Tech support.

Best of luck,

David Marx

This sounds like “pilot error” to me:> Adobe Photoshop Lightroom shouldn’t have any trouble copying and pasting settings from one file to another unless your Lightroom catalog is gigantic and stored on a totally inadequate hard drive. Just to be sure that you are doing everything right:

1. Are your file’s “missing or offline?” If the file’s are missing the copy and paste request, especially for develop settings, will always fail.
2. Are you sure that you selected the appropriate file for the copy part of the routine?
3. Is the “Show Metadata from Target Photo Only” option turned on? You can find this in the Library Module under the Metadata menu. If this option is turned on then you will only see the metadata from the most selected, the “active photo,” even a whole block of images is selected.
4. Have you tried pasting settings in the Library Module in Grid View? Sometimes activities like this fail in other view modes.

I hope one of these possibilities solves your troubles.

–
David Marx

In my opinion your images and your Lightroom index should live on the same hard drive. See My Photo Storage System: Two External Hard Drives for more details. I would go further though and add that I keep all of my images– regardless of file format–on the same disk as my catalog file. Lightroom could care less whether its a digital camera raw file, a tif, a jpeg, or a psd in terms of where it gets stored. By putting all things photographic on the same disk I know where to look for anything and everything that I might need. Of course, I back this disk up daily to another series of drives but it’s the place for all of my photography.

Now the RAW cache is a different matter. If you have the internal speed and space for a 200 GB raw cache then it makes sense to leave it on your internal disk. If you don’t have the space, and I don’t, then setting this to your fastest external hard drive makes sense. The thing about the raw cache though is that it takes up a lot of disk space and it is totally useless outside of Lightroom’s develop module. My advice is to give it as much space as you can on your fastest disk and then don’t worry about it.

–
David

Do you think the catalog and photo files should reside on the same HD?

Currently I have a external HD which I keep my RAW files. In this very same external HD I have my catalog. I have my RAW cache on my internal (OS) drive.

Would like to know what is the best setup to get the most our of my setup.

thx

Check out my comment on the article Recommended External Hard Drives for my thoughts on SSD.

In short, SSDs can certainly decrease search time for files and be a bit more shock-resistant/robust when compared to traditional spindle hard drives, but, for my purposes, they’re not worth the cost yet.

-Scott