Lightroom - how to move a library?

[james*b]

Hi

I ran out of disc space on my mac and bought a larger hard drive yesterday.

I want to move my whole Lightroom 4 library to the new drive but I am concerned about losing settings etc.

What is the best way to do this?

Thanks!

 

[maflynn]

You can keep the catalog on your local drive and use Lightroom's folder area to drag them to an external drive. Do it within Lightroom and not the Finder

 

[james*b]

Thanks - how should I move the catalogue to the new drive?

And after moving it, can I then just plug my external drive into my other mac and use the Lightroom library etc?

 

[maflynn]

How big is the catalog? I personally will be keeping my catalog on my local drive.

If you want to move it, then drag it to its new location in the Finder, and then double click it so LR opens up with it

 

[james*b]

How big is the catalog? I personally will be keeping my catalog on my local drive.

I guess it is only about 150gb--but the external disc has capacity for 500gb.

What are the disadvantages of not having the catlog on the local drive?

[/QUOTE] If you want to move it, then drag it to its new location in the Finder, and then double click it so LR opens up with it[/QUOTE]

Should I delete the original on the local drive?

 

[MCAsan]

I always keep my LR catalog on my rMBP SSD. It is only around 7GB for a catalog of over 100,000 referenced images. By leaving it on the internal SSD, I can import images in the field, cull and edit. When I get home I use LR to move the folders from my SSD to my external Library/Picitures/Lightroom folder that sits on a RAID pair. Both the SSD and external RAID set are backed up by TM to a separate drive.

With the Catalog and app on your local drive, you should get faster read/write performance compared to them bing on an external drive.

 

[jc1350]

I guess it is only about 150gb--but the external disc has capacity for 500gb.

What are the disadvantages of not having the catlog on the local drive?

If you want to move it, then drag it to its new location in the Finder, and then double click it so LR opens up with it

Don't confuse the catalog with the photos. They are separate entities. The catalog is the Lr info (metadata, alterations, etc). The photos are files in directories/folders in Finder. You can move the photos independant of where the actual catalog is stored, but you can move the photos only from within Lr. If you move the photos via Finder, Lr will not know where to find them.

When you move the folders/photos in Lr, it is actually moving them in Finder for you and updating the catalog at the same time.

You can move the catalog itself via Finder. Then you either double-click the catalog to open it or you can change the permanent location within Lr's preferences menu item.