Today’s Question: My current 8TB hard drive is filling and I think it is time to prepare to increase my storage capacity. I have a 20TB internal drive that can be installed in my PC. Can I move my Lightroom Classic files and photos to the new 20TB drive and then delete them from the original 8TB drive?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can most certainly move the Lightroom Classic catalog files and the photos to the larger storage without too much difficulty, though you do need to be careful with the process.
More Detail: There are several ways you could go about this task, but the approach I recommend is to copy the applicable files to the new destination, and then update the Lightroom Classic configuration to reflect the changes.
The first step would be to first quit Lightroom Classic and then copy the entire folder containing the catalog files to the new hard drive. After the copy is complete rename the folder on the original drive to reflect that it is now just a backup copy being held temporarily.
Then copy the entire photo storage to the new drive. If you don’t already have a top-level parent folder you might want to create it as part of this process, such as to create a “Photos” folder on the new drive and copy all folders for all photos into that drive. If the existing folder structure for folders was in a parent folder, I would rename that parent folder to indicate it is now a backup copy. If the drive is an external drive you can disconnect it, and if it is an internal drive you can change the drive letter (Windows) or the volume label (Macintosh). The point is to change the storage location so Lightroom Classic will not be able to find it where expected.
At this point you can open the catalog from the new hard drive location by double-clicking the file with the .lrcat filename extension in the catalog folder you copied to the new drive. Then go to the General tab of the Preferences dialog and set the catalog in the new location as the default catalog. This will ensure the catalog in the new location is always opened by default when you launch Lightroom Classic.
Initially all folders and photos will appear to be missing. But you can resolve that by reconnecting them to the new storage location. To do so, go to the top level folder above all existing folders, which might require you to right-click on the top folder on the list in the Folders section of the left panel in the Library module and choose “Find Missing Folder” from the popup. Then navigate to an open the related top level folder on the new drive, making sure that folder appears at the top-center of the dialog. Then click the Choose button to reconnect the top-level folder, which in turn will reconnect all subfolders and photos. At that point you can continue your normal workflow, and once you’ve backed everything up again you can delete the catalog folder and photos from their original location.
