Importing and Moving Files From Your Internal Hard Drive to an External Disk with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
Two new video tutorials today for beginning Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users on how to import and move files from one hard drive to another using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. In my opinion, most photographers will get more joy out of Lightroom if they store both their index (the Lightroom Catalog files) and all of their photographs on an external drive. See My Photo Storage System: Two External Hard Drives for more details on my file storage philosophy.
These videos are intended to help new Lightroom users find their photos, or the folders full of images, that currently live on their internal hard drive. Most beginning users need the extra help with this process and its great to know that Lightroom can do all of the heavy lifting. Once we have found these folders we can use Lightroom to copy, or move, these files over to an external disk. Before you start this process though I suggest reading all of the posts on how Lightroom works, and on how to best set up your preferences, in the Getting Started Right with Lightroom 3 section of our website. You will want all of these settings and templates in place before you start moving lots of files around with Lightroom.
If you are needing help with importing I urge you to also watch this tutorial on how to build an Import Preset in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. An Import Preset can make life simpler and make importing new files far more efficient.
Importing Images from a Single Folder with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 from David Marx on Vimeo.
Importing Scattered Files and Folders using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 from David Marx on Vimeo.
Filed Under: Importing Images • News • Tutorials
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 
Doesn’t Adobe suggest that you keep the catalog on an internal drive ? Having it on an external drive will slow LR down too won’t it ?
davidp.
Dear David,
As far as I know Adobe has no official position on this issue. I would go further and suggest that intentionally designed Lightroom so that either setup– an internal or an external catalog–is possible because their is no single right configuration. Where you store your catalog and your images is an issue that every professional photographer faces and there is no single solution.
I am a big advocate of external hard drive storage because my sole computer is a MacBook Pro laptop whose internal hard drive could never store my 40,000 images. Likewise, most of clients and students are primarily laptop users. If I had a Mac Pro tower and could load it up with four high-performance internal hard drives I might have a very different opinion….
It is true that an external hard drive could slow things down but if you get the right drive and use the right connection then the performance can be as good or better than what one would experience using an internal disk. See our post on Recommended External Hard Drives for more details.
Thanks for the good questions.
–
David
David,
Great tutorials I have been looking for something like this since Lightroom 3 was available. My problem is before I installed LR3 I was using Beta 2. I used the internal HD picture folder.(the default)
Now with LR3 I Made the 2 folders(my photos and catalog) on external HD.
I called Adobe tech support they took over my computer with my permission. Now I have a mess: I have no presets under print module /my presets. Under collections I have 2090 images without keywords. Any help would be great. Bob
Dear Bob,
I think that you missed a couple of steps. (I am assuming here that you had actually keyworded all of these images.) First, did you save all of your metadata down to file level before changing catalogs? If so then your keywords should still be there. If not then you probably want to relaunch the old beta catalog and do so either through the preferences panel or by selecting all your files and going Metadata > Save Metadata to File. Once saved your old keywords should be back though you may have to select all of your images and go Metada > Read Metadata from files.
Restoring the factory default print presets, and all of the other types of presets, is easy. Just go to the Preferences Menu > Presets Tab > and click everyone of the restore buttons. Don’t let the “are you sure” warnings scare you. If you had built your own presets / templates you need to find them and move them into the appropriate folder within the Lightroom Settings folder that is associated with your new catalog. See Getting Started Right: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3′s Critical Preference Menus for more details.
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David Marx
I just waned to say thank you for writing this post! I really enjoy reading through all of the posts on this site…fantastic information. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for your compliment, Mike! David has really been cranking out the Lightroom 3 posts!
-Scott
I come from one catalog for all my images (150’000+) to annual catalogs to catalogs per job. That’s the best thing I ever changed in my workflow! Everything gets faster and easier to handle. I store all DNG’s and the catalog in one folder per job. If I have to go for a trip and want to work on the road, I just grab this folder (copy it to an external drive) and have everything I need. Back home I only have to copy the folder back to my internal harddrive. No need to export a selection of images from the main catalog and reimporting into the catalog later again. Which is not only time consuming (even on a Mac Pro for jobs with 2000+ images), but also error-prone in my experience.
Give it a try and see what works best for you.
Dear Daniel,
I like your strategy and it is one that lot’s of professionals use but it has one potential pitfall. Your system is great up until the moment when you want to put together a portfolio, a gallery show, or a new website that features ALL of your best images. To find all of your best images you need to search multiple catalogs and you cannot use a collection to tie all of your assets together.
There are no rights and wrongs here– only options. You are absolutely right that using multiple catalogs makes separating one job from another easier but this simplicity will burn you when you are working on a project that spans multiple jobs. In the end though we absolutely agree on one thing: “Give it a try and see what works best for you.”
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David
Following up on what David Pascaoe said, I tried moving my catalog file onto my Drobo (via Firewire 800) for added redundancy. It slowed everything down to a crawl. I moved the catalog back to the internal drive (iMac) and everything got back up to speed. I believe that Time Machine takes care of backing up the catalog. I do have the luxury of having Lightroom on my Macbook Pro which only gets used on location. The DNGs get migrated over to the iMac/Drobo set-up as soon as I can and as soon as I’ve done one more set of back-ups the file gets expunged from the LR catalog on my laptop. It keeps things running lean and one client doesn’t need to see images from other clients’ shoots. If I didn’t have two computers I could really see the rationale behind keeping everything at the studio. As David Marx said, there is no right answer.
I guess I have my LR set up a little differently and was wondering how to fix it. This tutorial didn’t really address it, although the title seemed as if it would.
I am a mac user, and I’m also super careful about storing multiple copies of my raw files. I keep all original RAW photos on an external drive.
My import process is as follows:
1. copy the RAW files from my compact flash card to my desktop/Internal MacintoshHD, then eject the compact flash card.
2. open LR and then COPY (to new location) the photos when importing to LR. The location right now is on my Macintosh HD, in Pictures, subfolder named “Working Raw Photos” and then subfolders within that, depending on the topic.
3. once the photos are copied, I take the RAW files and move them to my external HD.
4. the LR catalog is also saved on Macintosh HD, in Pictures, subfolder “Lightroom” and they are stored in there. The catalog backs up automatically when exiting LR to my external HD, where the RAW photos are stored.
5. After every new import and day of work on the photos, I copy my “Working Raw Photos” to the external HD to back it up.
Questions
1. Does the backup in item 5 work? meaning, should my Macintosh HD fail, could I link LR to that Working Raw Folder on my external HD, as well as the catalog that is backed up there?
2. If I wanted to change everything and instead have all my LR photos stored on the external drive (rather than my Macintosh drive), how do I move the catalog and that “Working Raw File” to the external drive? I thought this tutorial addressed this second question, but it didn’t seem to.
Thanks!
I lost my HD containing my pictures. I know that Lightroom wont allow you to export your picture if the raw is lost. But I can live even with the preview files within the LR Library. Where can i find this preview files?
Thanks,
- Fernandel
Hi David,
A million thanks for your time and expertise in LR. I’m writing because I’ve recently moved all my photos to an external drive and then imported them into LR3. Everything went fine except that for each photo a .DAT file was created as well. Each .DAT file is exactly 8.4 MB. and is stored loose on my external drive. Did I do something wrong?
Dear Fearnandel,
You might find this plugin from Jeffery Freidl useful. It might, just might, allow to extract the jpeg previews from the Lightroom Preview Cache for your lost raw files. See Extract Cached Image Previews Lightroom Plugin.
best of luck,
David
Dear David:
I am a new to Lightroom user who did not have the benefit of your instruction prior to starting up Lightroom, so now my harddrive is full and creating issues.
I followed the tutorial on moving files to an external drive and creating a new catalogue.
As far as I can tell all of the image files have moved but I am only seeing 7500 +/- thumbnails for 11700 +/- images in the catalogue.
I have tried selecting the subfolders where the images reside and tried “add”ing them to the catalogue to no avail.
I would appreciate any thoughts.
Iris
Dear Iris Jackson,
I am not sure that I completely understand your question. In the Lightroom Library module what happens if you switch to the Grid view (keyboard shortcut is the letter G), select the “All Photographs” option in the Catalog Panel on the left sidebar, and then turn off all your filters? Now can you see all 11700 thumbnails? Is it the thumbnails that are missing or the images themselves? How many images did you have in your Lightroom index before you started moving things around?
Rather than adding in sub-folders that I suspect are already in your Lightroom index try this:
1. Right-click on one of your folder names within the folders panel inside of the Library module. Press the “Add Parent Folder” button. In my world, this adds the “Photos Go Here” folder that I created as the container for all of my image sub-folders. For you this might add something like “Pictures” or “My Pictures” to the top of the folder hierarchy.
2. Now right-click on this top-level folder (the one that we just added) and now use the “Synchronize” button. This may take a while but it tells Lightroom to check through every folder and to add in any image that it finds along this path that is not currently in your index.
If this doesn’t solve your troubles please write me back and let me know whether it’s the thumbnails that are missing or the actual images.
–
David
In my workshops I often preach that “all of the secrets to success in life are in the right-click!”
David,
Great articles on using external drives!
I am trying to setup an external drive and backup system using the Seagate GoFlex Net that allows hard drives to be accessed through the wireless or wired router. I have two computers (PCs), a desktop and a laptop. The pictures store well on the shared drives, but LR 2 (in my case, waiting to upgrade) still doesn’t allow sharing a catalog on a net setup like this. Does LR 3 allow this, and if not is this in the future plan for Adobe?
Thanks, again, Jack
Dear Jack,
Lightroom is not a network ready program regardless of version :< I feel your pain too and there are other programs out there for image management that can do this but currently Lightroom cannot.
You can however work with images that are stored over a network but your catalog must be stored on a local disk. You can use software like dropbox to synchronize your catalog from computer to computer across a network though but again the Lightroom catalog itself (your .lrcat file) must be stored on a local disk. See http://lightroom-blog.com/2010/08/more-dropbox-tips.html for more info on using dropbox.
I do not know of any plans to make future versions of Lightroom more network friendly. This doesn't mean that they won't, or that the folks at Adobe aren't working on this right now, but so far I have not seen any public statements indicating that they intend to re-write the entire program so that it will work on all the complicated varieties of networks that one could create.
–
David
As a LR newbie, I have a real mess. (I wish I’d found this website before I started!) I now have photos in my catalog both on my internal hard drive as well as my external hard drive. Worse, some of the directories on the internal hard drive have the same name as those that already exist on the external drive. So, while I’ve discovered how to move entire directories of previously cataloged photos within the Lightroom Library module simply by dragging the folder from internal to external, I haven’t yet figured out how to move individual photos from folder 2010-05-01 on the internal drive to folder 2010-05-01 on the external drive since they’re already cataloged — at least not without removing them from the catalog, moving them in Finder, then reimporting. I’d like to believe there’s an easier way. Moving in Finder and then having LR find the missing photos didn’t seem to work. If there were just a few of these, it wouldn’t be a problem, but… Any suggestions are most welcome!
Re my previous append, the approach of moving the files from the directory on internal drive to the directory of the same name on the external drive and using Lightroom to locate the missing photo by clicking on the question mark of the photo in the old location and manually pointing to the new location is working. I think I was too tired when I tried it before and wasn’t looking in the right place to see what was going on. It’s still quite tedious and I’d love an easier way, but this is getting it done.