Alan321 Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Ian's advice about using Lr to move stuff around is normally correct. However, if you intend to move everything then use this approach, read it all before following it:
1. In Lr, make sure that its folder hierarchy has a top-level folder - maybe even the root directory of the drive - under which all images are stored. If necessary, tell it to show parent folder until it encompasses the entire image hierarchy. The only downside to this is that it makes the folder list wider, and you can undo it later on if you want to.
2. Get out of Lr and do not use it during the transfer
3. Copy your catalog to somewhere that you can give it a different name, just in case you mess something up.
4. Copy all of the image files to the new drive without changing their relative folder hierarchy. i.e. don't rearrange anything. You must copy the top-most common folder as found in step 1, but you do not need to go higher than that (although it doesn't matter if you do).
5. Disable the old drive in Disk Management, or just remove it, so that the drive letter that Lr expects to find will not be available. The new drive should not have the same drive letter as the original at this stage, but we can fix that later on.
6. Run Lr and open the usual catalog. It will flag up missing files and folders.
7. Right click on the top folder in the Lr hierarchy list, find the missing folder by telling Lr to use the same folder name in the new drive. Lr will find it and all of the images and folders beneath it. This is easy and quick. All done.
If you want to revert to the old drive letter then get out of Lr, change the drive letter, and do steps 6 and 7 again. However, if you do that then the old backup drive and new drive will share the same drive letter and Windows may not like that if you ever have running at once.
What makes this process easy and fast is having the one common folder name above all of your image-bearing folders. After you have made the change to the new drive you can hide this common folder if that suits your needs, but it is easier to leave it as is just in case you need to swap drives again.
Although this is probably not relevant for your particular needs this time, Lr can be made to see multiple drives at once from a single catalog, but then you would need to use Ian's method of shifting folders around with Lr - and that method is much slower.
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