How To Move Your Lightroom Photos To Another Drive 

This is hands down the best file management tutorial on RU-vid. I think it even beats Adobe's Lightroom Channel! Thank you!

Better method (method 2) starts at 10:01

this is legitly one of the best videos ive found about this.

omg you just explained it so clearly! I have watched countless videos trying to figure this out and you just nailed it. Thank you so much.

It’s 4 years old but this explained everything I wondered and wanted to know. Thank you, Terry!

Your video helped me a couple of years ago and it's helped me again today. Thank you Terry!

Thank you Terry for the simple explanation of a rather unintuitive Lightroom method of moving files. This has been bothering me for a while. Great job at explaining it.

wow... so many hypebeast workflow tutorials that get all convoluted and T.White just hits a home run. Very focused and straight forward. My HD is maxed out and catalogue is a mix of film and digital photos and this video gives me the confidence that I can separate the catalogues into two, move them to external and still be able to work on and access things I need.

Many thanks for this simple explanation of how to move images within LR. You are my saviour!

Thanks Terry! I've been wondering about what I'm going to do when I run out of hard drive space and need to upgrade. Feel better now after watching this.

This is the single greatest Lightroom video I have ever watched thank you so much for really breaking this down!

Can't tell you how much I appreciate this video. Thank you Terry.

FANTASTIC. Answers so many questions, including how I expect to integrate OneDrive into LR to gain back local space. Thanks for a great video!

Great stuff Terry. So so many folks do it wrong and move stuff outside of Lr and then get in trouble trying to clean it all up. This should be one of the FIRST classes anyone using Lr watches to put good habits in place early on. I even think Adobe should make it a mandatory video tutorial (a shorter version of course) when someone starts using Lr for th4 first time and forces them to watch this so they dont mess up from day 1 :) Keep it up

What an incredible help; thank you Terry. I have 18000 images on my hard drive (which slows things down). I installed an additional hard drive on my PC but couldn't figure out how to move many of them and still be connected to Lightroom. This is great; thanks so much for this and all your other efforts. Peter

Thank you so much. I have filled up my 500gb laptop with raws this year.... Only 5 gb free now... I've been dreading moving raws off the laptop onto storeage because I didn't know how Lightroom would handle it 😂 Thank you 🙏

Thank you, I had seen a similar video from Adobe but your calm and simple approach helped me do it now. Thanks Terry

I was going nuts trying to figure out why LR Classic CC would not see my external when I wanted to move photos from my laptop to the external. Now I can go have a glass of wine. Thanks!!

My catalogues are so messed up, I don't know where to start. This video gives me somewhere to start. I've got a lot of work to do. Thank you.

Wish I had seen this a couple or four years ago!!! Still, better late than never and your video is very useful, thank you! You present in a great style, easy to follow and understand. Excellent!

TL;DR - Drag the folder from one drive to the other in the left-hand panel in Library.

Terry !! Thanks so much! I have watched 20+ videos but in vain... Now I understand ! All the best

Hi Scott - Terry White does an excellent job explaining this technique! Thank you for sharing with us!

Finally explained in a way that make sense. Excellent video. Thank you!

Thank you for the great lesson about how to move files in Lightroom.

Second method is fantastic. Thanks finally got all my photos to my external drive with RAID1 setup. Works well with LR6

Thank you, this answers my questions on how to free space on my Mac without messing up LR!

I have been searching for this answer all afternoon. THANK YOU 🙏

This is great and very useful! Thank you Mr. White!

Thank you Sir! recently got a desktop and almost instantly filled up my 1Tb ssd. This will help me get on track and sort out my stuff better.

Best tutorial I’ve seen about this topic. Thanks!

Super helpful! Thanks. Especially the last part. Answers my question

cant believe it took me this long to figure this stuff out.... now i feel like a pro. =)

Thanks Terry, for an exceptionally clear explanation.

Hi Terry, thank you for sharing the methods and making the more efficient one simple.

Thank you Terry. Worked perfectly. Simple and easy. Moved from a 4 tb external to an 8 tb. external.

Fantastic explanation by Terry White! Thank you!!

Thanks for making what looks like a complicated process, relatively easy.

BEST tutorial ever!! sooo intuitive and helpful

Very good and informative. I am purchasing a new laptop where original pictures will need to be stored on the cloud. Can Lightroom see a cloud connected drive used for backup?

Thank you Terry, I always come back for this tutorial.

Oh snap! I've been looking for this answer for quite some time. Thanks Scott and Terry! :)

Thank you, I believe I finally understand how this all works thanks to your video!!

Clear instructions, thank you. Good to occasionally see you along with screen shot.

Awesome video Terry, very helpful. Is it possible to also duplicate images from one external hard drive to another as a double back up?

Thank you so much for this video. Saved so much time and headache!

Bro. I'm such a newbie and this video helped me out!! THANK YOU

Your videos are fabulous. Thank you . I am trying to move photos from an old EXTERNAL to a new EXTERNAL drive . I am not sure of the process when its 2 external drives …? Can u recommend or help . I prefer to copy - instead of move … so i have them on both drives … i wish to do this is Lightroom. Please help 😊❤ Thank u !!!!

Great video Terry, What about a SATA SSD drive in your computer you want to move your images from an old drive in the computer? Ex: Drive G with the images on it ,to a new drive Drive Letter F .

Great and clear tutorial Another lightroom headache resolved 😊

Thank you for this information. I am brand new to my Mac book pro and using Lightroom. I tried your second method and for some reason my seagate back hard drive won't let me create a new folder. It's there but grayed out. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

Thank you!!!❤ You it explained it slowly and clearly. Managed to get all my photos to my external SSD now!😁

So awesome! Kept wondering why the heck LrClassic wouldn't show my new ehd. So simple. Ty ty ty!!!

Soooooo amazingly helpful!!! Thank you!!

Hi Terry. Thank you so much for your friendly and concise videos. I have somewhat of a different scenario that I am sure is not uncommon and hope you can help ASAP as I have editing projects I need to get done this weekend. I have over 120,000 photos and video in my Catalog which were all mapped to a WD 4TB My Book portable drive, which ran out of space. I bought a 10TB version and moved everything to new Drive (meant to copy not move). Old drive was named K Drive which is where LR imported to. New Drive was named G Drive. I unplugged old G drive after the move (yes, outside LR) and plugged new G Drive into same port thinking I could just rename to K and would be back to work. First, computer will not let me rename the new G Drive to K. Second not sure what the proper approach is at this point to make sure LR sees this Catalog on new G Drive and going forward the default allows it to import to new G Drive. Any help is greatly appreciated by you and the community !

You nailed it, just what I needed.

Muchas gracias desde Mexico!!!

It is important to point out that the "better" method entails some risks too. It is a well known LR problem that during the move from one folder to another, LR may "forget" to move some pictures, will not identify the problem or signal an issue, and your images are just gone, lost forever. It is a well known problem and Adobe did not find a solution to it yet, to my knowledge. This happened to me, moving a large amount of pictures, and I do not trust the LR move system anymore, since that. I always copy from one folder to another and then reconnect. I know that this video is a bit old, and I wonder if you had any update since then. Thank you!

So simple! Just what I was looking for! Thank you. Aloha from Maui

Im commenting for the algorithm! This was super helpful and went straight into what I needed! Thank you!

Explained it perfectly!

Very clear explanation, thank you so much! This helped a lot!

Thank you! I thought I was in big trouble but you should me how to move a bunch of images I had on the wrong HD to the HD I wanted them on.

Actually Lightroom is somewhat broken. Your second method moving the folders in LR isn't always applicable. In Windows "Pictures" is a special logical folder, which is managed and mapped by Windows to a physical location that you can choose. When I ran out of space in my local drive, I remapped "Pictures" logical folder to a network drive. Windows took care of moving the files. And all programs that are designed correctly continue working as if nothing happened, because they address the logical "Pictures" folder rather than the physical folder. That should have been the end of the story. Not so with LR, which apparently doesn't know how Windows works, it lost track of everything. Well, I though loading an existing catalog from a new physical location would solve the problem. Not so fast. LR doesn't allow catalog to be located on remote drive, so I had to copy the catalog back to the local drive. After that LR opened catalog, but it was still looking at the old physical "Pictures" location instead of the logical location. Fortunately, that was easy to solve, right click on the root "Pictures" folder in LR, and select find location then pointing to the new location and LR found all subfolders and all pictures in them. Had LR been designed correctly in Windows, and worked with logical drives instead of physical locations, none of that would have been necessary.

What!?! Thank you!!!! So simple!

This video is amazing. I wish I would have found this years ago.

Thanks, this is great. However I do have a problem since I'm trying to move images to a separate drive on my Computer (I have two drives) and it's already connected to my system.. Lightroom doesn't seem to want to recognize that separate drive versus a another drive that you "connect." Any suggestions would be appreciate. Again, thanks for a very good presentation. Peter

So appreciate this video! Worked like a charm just when I needed it, whew! Thank youuuuu! :D

Big Help! Thank you!

what if i want to work with the same catalog on a different computer? is it the same process?

Terry, hi. I follow you and you are a great help. I hope you can help me with my problem. I am trying to move photos out of light room (mac computer, 15 yrs old). I got quite a few files moved and filled up my flash drive. When I put in another flash drive (same brand,) and try and name it in files it won't recognize the flash drive. I have tried everything I can think of with no help. Do you have any idea why this is happening? Thank you for your time, Shirleen

Just what I needed 🙏🏾

Terry loved this! But help...if I have all of my photos on an external hard drive that I started on my MacBook Air and I now have a desktop iMac and also have photos not stored on my computer but on another external hard drive how can I merge those together?

Hey, when I add a folder so that Lightroom can acknowledge my external hard drive, the option to add a "new folder" is not available (not blue). Even when I try to drag a folder of pictures from the desktop to the external hard drive icon, it doesn't allow me. Not sure why it isn't working like the video! It won't seem to let me add anything to my new external hard drive.

Terry is a master

Question: If you have all of your photos in an external hard drive and your computer dies, when you get a new computer and upload the new lightroom in your new computer, what's the process to have lighroom to reconize all of the data (photos) from the external hard drive.. Do you have to import everything all over again? 3Tera or data. Thank you in advance for the answer.!

Excellent. But what if I had moved files from one hard disk to another without lightroom. How do you simply reassign folders to the new hard drive? Not so simple. And futher how to reassign photos in saved collections to the new hard drive from the old hard drive?

Thank you. That saved me some time working it out.

thank you so much for this tutorial!!

best explanation i had, thank you

Amazing video. Thank you.Does this back up my raw files also?

Related question to this situation... Like you I move my "worked and done" photos fom my MAC to a separated wireless external HD (lets call it HD1) which is constantly mapped with the LR folders (and I use the right method for moving the files btw). Now, about 4x per year, for extra safety I do make a backup of that HD1, copying everything from there into another wired usb external HD (lets call it HD2), which I just keep stored til the next backup. That HD2 is not mapped in LR, because that would simply double the size of my LR catalog with the same worked files, I simply move the files using Mac's Finder from HD1 to HD2. So... What should if at some point by accident my HD1 gets wiped? I will have the good backup on my HD2 but it won't be perfectly in sync with the LR catalog since I only backup those files 4x per year, so I know I will lose some files and edits. But for the vast majority of files which I can recover, should I just simply move those files back to HD1 and open LR, hoping it will sync back up the folders? Will it accept the new copied files and will it reject them?

How do I move my catalog to an external SSD? Can you do a video for that or link me to one you perhaps have done on this subject. Thanks. BTW, Great video

can you drag all your photos (all photographs) into external hard drive or do you have to go folder by folder

Great video, thanks!

Your are freaking incredible! I love this. You are incredibleee

Awesome, Thank You!

Considering he didn’t answer people asking questions, thought I’d ask anyway: can the drag and drop work if done within the same drive? I have so many subfolders and need to get rid of them. For example: Outdoor Photography > 2019 > 2019 > August > actual date. I followed another youtuber’s tutorial 🤦🏻‍♀️ So I need to get rid of the middle folders. If anyone else knows, I’d appreciate your answer!

I have exported as catalog to an external drive all the time.. But I just descovered that all the editing I made on those raw files and the tiff files exported back in from PS aren't there now when opening upp the catalog from the external drive. What did I do wrong? The second method you show looks realy god.. Can I do that afterwords .. let Lightroom know what folders I allready have stored on my external and make smart previews?

Thanks for the video. Will this work for an entire photo catalog of over 80,000 photos? Or is there yet a better way? I am out of room on my external drive that I use and have purchased a 8T hard drive to move my photos to.

Thank you so much for the great tutorial!

Worked like a charm :)

Great tip. I"m sure the same applies for Lightroom CC, correct?

is this similar to like where i want to save the edits to another device and forgot to backup the catalog and only saved the original photos?

Thanks Terry great advise as always!

Nice video. Quick question... LR seems to want to copy the existing folder structure into a folder in the root directory of the new drive in order to move the folders from one drive to the next. Is there a way to move folder structure from one root to another root?

Damn you're a good insulator. Thanks 👍

Can someone please explain how this differs from just having lightroom auto backup, and then having your computer backup to a hard drive? Thanks!

thank you very much sir .

Great video! What’s the best way to manage Lightroom when you travel with a laptop and external drive, but don’t want to plug in the drive while on an airplane... then when you get home, be able to work on the iMac. I’m trying out a Mac air w/128g thumb drive with light room catalog on it and 3TB external drive with all my photos on it. So far it seems to work.