Are you running out of space on the hard drive where your photos are stored? In this video tutorial I’ll show you how to safely move large quantities of photos to another hard drive without leaving Lightroom confused.
This video is one of 107 in 24+ hours of content in my Lightroom 5, 6 and Classic CC: The Fundamentals & Beyond (v. 8) video series – start mastering and feeling confident in Lightroom today!
This content is for Lightroom Classic (AKA Lightroom Classic CC), CC 2015, Lightroom 6 and earlier versions of this Lightroom program that have "Library Develop Map Book Slideshow Print Web" modules listed across the top. It is not for the newer simplified cloud-based Lightroom (AKA Lightroom CC).
For those of you who want context before watching the video, there are two ways to move your Lightroom photos:
- Within Lightroom using the Folders panel, drag and drop them to the new location (if on a different drive, then after importing 1+ images from the new drive so that it shows up in the Folders panel). This method of moving files has the advantage of not confusing Lightroom – it sees you move the files, so it never becomes confused about where they have moved to, and you don’t end up with question marks on folders and exclamation marks on thumbnails. I use this method for moving small to medium quantities of folders and files because it is most convenient. Note though that I don’t do any moving of files without having backups of my photos – so in the rare situation that Lightroom crashes and files are possibly lost, I am covered.
- Move them outside of Lightroom and then tell Lightroom where the files went, since it can’t see you move them. I use this method when I’m moving large quantities of files, such as when I move all my photos or a year of photos to a new drive. In this video tutorial I’ll show you this method. It allows me to be extra cautious – copying the photos to the new location, verifying that they copied successfully, and then deleting the originals.
For best quality, after hitting Play click on the sprocket wheel in the bottom right and choose 720/HD.
Related Content
Article: How to Move Your Lightroom Catalog (Stay tuned to my blog for a video tutorial on this, coming soon)
Video Tutorial: Learn to use Lightroom’s Folders panel to reorganize your files and folders
Check out the full 24-hour 107-video Lightroom 5, 6 and Classic CC: The Fundamentals & Beyond V. 8 series and start mastering Lightroom today!
Laura,I always enjoy your tutorials,webinars,and tips,,and am hoping you can advise me on something i got myself into trouble in Lightroom! On my F drive,i had over 15000 pictures in my family name Folder,lets say Smith,,and within that Smith folder,I had subfolders,about 20,named after family members which had their own pictures in those folders,,well, I installed a new hard drive and moved the Smith folder to new location on new hard drive,,not knowing that it would not move subfolders and their contents,now on new drive,i just have Smith folder,with ALL the pictures,not broken up into subfolders! Its going to take a lonf time to go thru and create new folders,and then search for pictures of particular person so i can move to newly named folder for them,,is there an easier way? Thanks so much,Kevin
Hi Kevin, it sounds to me like you selected the photos in the Smith folder and moved them, rather than selecting and moving the folder. At this point the best way forward would be to restore that folder from a hard drive backup, and then if you did that move from within Lightroom, so that the Lightroom Folders panel also shows just the Smith folder, revert to your last catalog backup from before it happened, so that Lightroom has the subfolders and will match up to what you restored on your hard drive (or restore the catalog from the hard drive backup too – that way they’re from the same date).
If you don’t have backups, then I’d recommend using face tagging in Lightroom to tag all your photos with names and then doing a keyword filter on a name and assigning them to a collection or folder of that person’s name. (Usually I recommend a collection instead of a folder in this case because if two people are in an image, you can’t put the image in two folders, but you can put it in two collections.) Using face tagging, Lightroom will start recognizing people, so it will be much faster than manually looking for people. If you have my Fundamentals & BeyondFundamentals & Beyond series, there are three relevant videos – face tagging, organizing and managing keywords, and filtering (searching for photos).
Thanks so much for your reply,,I just purchased both,looking forward to the training!