Today’s Question: Do you recommend splitting photos managed by Lightroom Classic between two external hard drives? Or is it preferable to purchase a larger external drive?
Tim’s Quick Answer: In general, I would prefer to have all photos stored on a single hard drive. However, due to practical limitations that isn’t always the best solution, leading me to split my photos between two hard drives.
More Detail: I prefer (and generally recommend) a workflow that is as streamlined as possible. That means using only a single catalog for Lightroom Classic, and ideally storing all photos on a single hard drive. However, a single hard drive isn’t always the best solution.
For example, I prefer to use portable bus-powered hard drives for my data storage, in large part for convenience when it comes to traveling with my drives. However, that also means that my storage capacity options are limited. Most bus-powered external hard drives max out at around 4TB of storage capacity, any my photos take up closer to 8TB. The 8TB hard drives that are available are generally either not bus-powered, don’t have a form factor that meets my needs, or are at a price point that makes them far less appealing.
As a result, I’ve opted to store my photos across two hard drives, even though I’d prefer them to all be on the same hard drive.
In Lightroom Classic, the only issue with having photos stored on two drives is that you’ll have two hard drives (and therefore two sets of folders) listed in the Folders list on the left panel in the Library module. All other features behave normally. For example, you can add photos to collections regardless of which hard drive the source images happen to be stored on.
So, if it isn’t practical to use a single large hard drive to store all the photos you’re managing with Lightroom Classic, you can most certainly use more than one hard drive for that storage. I just recommend coming up with some logical way to define which photos are on which hard drive, so it will be easier to know where to start looking for a particular folder of photos, for example.
