Moving Files Lightroom to Portable Hard Drive

[Kathleen]

Hi Damien!

Congrats on the new page, looks great so far!

 

I was a bit concerned about my exporting/saving/backing up process out of Lightroom. I currently use Lightroom then move to photoshop for bigger edits then back to Lightroom as a final step in editing. I then like to export my catalogs to my portable hard drive. So I right click on my folder with images, select EXPORT THIS FOLDER AS A CATALOG then save to Portable hard drive and check the boxes EXPORT NEGATIVE FILES, INCLUDE AVAILABLE PREVIEWS. Then I delete the catalog right from Lightroom to empty space.

So that is basically my process...

Couple of questions...

When I do this, I still have to go back to the photos in my hard drive and delete them from there right? If so, is there a less time consuming way to do this? (I am hesitant to save to my hard drive from the get go because I always delete many images from my folders before the final save)

I included a screenshot of what my files look in my portable hard drive. An additional question, when I was looking at the files in portable hard drive, I noticed the images in the picture folder were not edited and did not include all of the files I saved. But when I click on Lightroom Ircat folder and reopen in lightroom they are all there in final edit form. Is this a safe method that I am using?

 

Hopefully this makes sense, thank you for your help!

[Samantha LaRue]

I don't know much about LR - but I do know this.

 

Your Catalog does NOT include your files. You have to manually back up your files as well. Backing up your catalog on its own is not sufficient.

Please wait to start deleting things until one of the more experienced LR users of our team can come along to assist.

[Anna-Lena Ström McGrath]

Shouldn't this be in the LR section of the forum and not misc @samantha

[Samantha LaRue]

13 minutes ago, Anna-Lena Ström McGrath said:

Shouldn't this be in the LR section of the forum and not misc @samantha

Good catch! I didn't even notice since I was on mobile. I'll move it now to make it easier to find.

[Christina Keddie]

OK, wow, hold up.

First of all -- why are you creating a new catalog for every single session?  That's adding so much extra time and confusion to your workflow, and just the thought of your organization system on your hard drives is giving me hives.   This means any time you want to go back to access the files from a given session (say you're pulling photos for your website portfolio, which will require you to pull photos from multiple sessions), you'll have to open a new catalog in LR and wait for it to load and get your flagged favorites from that one session, then open a new catalog and repeat, and repeat, and repeat...  And you can't take advantage of LR's amazing flagging and sorting functions except within one session at a time.  And you've completely Balkanized your hard drive organization.  It's madness!

Secondly -- because you've created separate catalogs for everything, there is no less time-consuming method to delete files from your hard drive.  As a general principle, you should be using LR to manage your files -- delete, move, rename all your files within LR's Library, not on your hard drive.  This way, you won't break the connection between LR's catalog and your files.  But because you have zillions of catalogs, you'd have to go into each one individually and manage your files from there.

You've got to stop thinking in terms of catalogs as your smallest unit of organization within LR.   You only need to create a new catalog if you're starting to see performance slowdowns -- on my 2013 iMac with 8GB of RAM, I still only have the one catalog for ALL of my files (about 23,000 files the last time I checked).  Others choose to create a new catalog per year.  But seriously, in case I haven't made my incredulity clear yet: one catalog per session is insane!

 

[Christina Keddie]

Your currently active catalog should remain on your internal hard drive.  Any archived catalogs could be exported off your internal if you want to make more space, but again, you should only need to do this exporting business once a year or so.

It does make sense to move your *files* off of your internal once you've finished a session.  Simply use LR's Library to select the relevant folders and move them to your external hard drive.  But keep them all within the current catalog!!

And then once you're ready to delete files off of your hard drives, just go into LR's Library again, find the files (on either your internal or external hard drives) and delete the files.

[Christina Keddie]

1 hour ago, Kathleen said:

When I do this, I still have to go back to the photos in my hard drive and delete them from there right? If so, is there a less time consuming way to do this? (I am hesitant to save to my hard drive from the get go because I always delete many images from my folders before the final save)

Also, and VERY importantly: no files ever exist "in" LR!!  I'm not sure what you mean by being "hesitant to save to my hard drive from the get go," but your files necessarily reside on your hard drive from the get go.  Your LR catalog simply records the steps you take in processing your files.  It does not contain your physical files at all!

[Kathleen]

Hi Christina…. I am beginning to understand what you mean. And yes your right I would have to pull each catalog back in from external and then get what I want from each… I agree ridiculous, guess I didn't think that far ahead before.  I definitely felt like I was doing something wrong. 

 

So I did some youtubing and I am understanding opening external drive from within LR and then moving files around that way.

I was concerned with having all of my files saved to my hard drive on computer so that is why I was thinking exporting as a new catalog to an external hard drive would be better. But I now understand what problems this could pose now.

So I am going to keep my files all in one catalog. Can you help me understand how to backup my photos to an external hard drive then? In case my computer crashes one day. I have lightroom setup to do backups when I close the program but as you said LR doesn't hold the files themselves. How would I go about saving a copy of the images to another place like external drive? 

[Christina Keddie]

Backing up your files is a very important task, and is entirely separate from LR.  Repeat after me until it sticks: LIGHTROOM DOES NOT CONTAIN ANY OF YOUR FILES.   

Here's my uploading/importing/backup workflow, just to give you an idea of where your files live at all times:

1. Plug in my CF card into my card reader.  (On El Capitan on a Mac, the Photos program will automatically open.  Shut that sucker down right away and never let it see the light of day.)  Double-click on the icon on my desktop for the card that pops up when it's inserted (or you can open Finder and navigate to the card manually), and copy the files over onto my hard drive.

2. First level backup: I have a 4TB external hard drive that stays plugged into my computer at all times, and I run Time Machine on it for backups.  It automatically backs up all files on my computer.

3. Second level backup: I have Crashplan (a cloud-based backup system) running, that backs up all my files to the cloud.

4. Open Lightroom.  In the Library module, click import, then navigate to the folder in the hard drive where I've saved my new raw files.  Import the files into my LR catalog.  IMPORTANT NOTE: all this is doing is pointing LR to those files where they exist in the folder.  You are in no way bringing any files into LR itself.  LIGHTROOM DOES NOT CONTAIN ANY OF YOUR FILES.  

5. Use LR to do all my raw processing. Right-click a file and choose "edit in" to send it to PS for additional edits; when done with the PS edits, do a simple save (not a "save as") and the edited master file will pop up in my LR filmstrip right next to my original raw file.

6. As I'm editing, I 3-star my keeper master files.  (I'm a wedding photographer, so I'm not always bringing every file into PS; so I'll 3-star either the master PSD that comes back after PS editing, or the final LR-processed file.)  When I'm done editing the whole session or event, I filter to show just the 3-stars, and then export all the files -- I use LR to batch rename my files sequentially and save the final output JPGs into a new subfolder.

7. I also use LR to 4-star photos for blogging, and 5-star photos I'll want to put in my website portfolio.  This makes it really easy for me to pull all my 5-star photos from a year when it comes time to update my portfolio, etc.

8. If I ever want to move files from my internal hard drive to an external hard drive, I would go into my LR Library module, select the folders, and move them to the external hard drive that way.

 

Other important side notes:

* You don't keep your *files* in a single catalog -- you keep the record of the LR edits you've made to each file.  The files themselves are all on your hard drive.  LR just points to those files.  This, incidentally, is why it's important to do all your renaming and moving of folders in LR itself -- if you rename a folder or move it directly on your hard drive, you've broken the connection between the file and the LR catalog, and the next time you come back to the file in LR, it will throw you an error saying that the file is missing.

* I'm on a desktop with 3TB of space on my internal hard drive, so I really have never felt the need to move files off my internal hard drive.  The only real reason to do that is if you don't have enough space on your internal, and the lack of space is starting to impact your computer's performance.

* Backing up requires multiple copies of your files -- simply moving them from your internal to an external isn't doing you any good, because the external is just as likely to die on you (and many externals are actually *more* likely to die than the hard drive in your Mac).  Follow the 3-2-1 rule: at least three copies of all files, on at least two different types of media, and at least one copy off-site.

[Kathleen]

Ooooooh thank you!!! Thanks for your patience and for giving me so many details, I seriously appreciate it!! I definitely don't have that much Ram on my internal, says I have 8gb. I am going to buy a 1TB hard drive as I am a newb and don't have much work. I will use your method, it makes sense to me. 

I see that Crashplan is $59 a year for single computer so that is not too bad and I have been reading good thing about it today. I never even knew about Time Machine until today and I am still on an old OS for Mac. I need to upgrade to El Capitan so I can download other programs like MS Office that I just purchased through work but I wanted to make sure I had everything backed up first which brought me to all of this. Which is a good thing because I have learned so much already. 

I am still operating Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5 so I am hoping there are no complications when I upgrade. 

 

 

[Christina Keddie]

Happy to help!

And just a side note: 8GB of RAM is your working memory, what your computer uses to run programs.  Your hard drive space is a different number altogether.    In your "About this Mac" window, it's the "Storage" tab that tells you how much space you have on your hard drives.

Feel free to come back with other questions!  I can help with some of the Mac questions, though the Ask Brian section of this forum is a better place for those questions.

[Kathleen]

Oooh lol see still learning, ok I have 1 TB on my Mac hard drive. lol thank you!

[Christina Keddie]

Haha, good, I'm glad you don't have just 8GB on your hard drive!