In this free video tutorial I’ll show you how to move your Lightroom catalog – to another location on the same hard drive, to a different hard drive, or even to a new computer.

Background:

The Lightroom catalog contains all of the work you do in Lightroom – editing, keywording, flagging, collections, etc.  The Lightroom catalog does not contain your photos – those are stored separately. As you work in Lightroom, Lightroom is constantly writing out your work to the catalog. By default your Lightroom catalog (and companion files) are stored in a Lightroom folder within Pictures on your internal drive.

Whether to store your catalog on an internal or external hard drive depends on your needs:

One advantage of storing your Lightroom catalog on your internal drive (or any SSD drive) is that reading and writing to the drive are often faster, potentially improving Lightroom performance. Whether this performance improvement is enough that you’d notice it depends on your system configuration and on your sensitivity to small performance lags. If your computer is a laptop, another advantage of having it on the internal drive is that when you’re traveling (even to the sofa, as I do) you can work in Lightroom without carrying external hard drives with you. Even if your photos are on an external drive, without that drive plugged in you you can do Library module and output-design tasks; if you build “smart previews”, also stored with the catalog, you can also edit your photos without the drive connected.

On the other hand, storing your catalog (along with your photos) on an external drive is a good solution if you regularly work on two or more computers – you can just plug this external drive into whichever computer you want to work on and be up and running. Even if you only work with one computer, you may choose to store your catalog along with your photos on an external drive so that all of your photography files are together on one drive.

After showing you in this video tutorial how to move the catalog (and rename it if desired), I also cover how to use your Lightroom catalog on two or more computers. If you also want to move your photos, watch this video tutorial next.

For best quality, after hitting Play click on the sprocket wheel in the bottom right and choose 720/HD.

If you enjoyed and learned from this video, imagine how much you’ll enjoy and learn from the whole Lightroom 5, 6 and Classic CC: The Fundamentals & Beyond V. 8 series – 107 videos and 24+ hours of content!

Learn How to Safely Move Your Lightroom Photos to Another Hard Drive

Laptop Users: Travel Light with Smart Previews

Check out the series this video tutorial comes from: Lightroom 5, 6 and Classic CC: The Fundamentals & Beyond V. 8 – 24+ hours of content in 107 videos!