Comments on: Lightroom Galleries with External Drives

By: sam i am photography

sam i am photography — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:56:39 +0000

what do i do when you get a message when trying to edit in external editor / photoshop. Lightroom was unable to prepare the selected file at /Volumes/G-DRIVE/SAMIAM/WORK/clients/in progress/Yulia Zoloeva/beach/IMG_7185.CR2 for editing.
It will not be opened.

By: Liza

Liza — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:02:36 +0000

Hi RC! Thanks for this wonderful tutorial! I have the same comment as Charlotte above and just like her, I wish I would have seen your tutorial earlier!

By: mark shirley

mark shirley — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:52:36 +0000

Nice tutorial RC
but what if you have a dozen filled externals you need
2 images for a job and they are on different drives

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:27:32 +0000

Hi, I’ve always saved to my hard disk, now want to move to external, how do I move images (whilst keeping lrcat and data file on hard disk) and maintain the image links? export catalogue? – don’t want to individually re-link 4,000 pics!. Good tutorial – if only I’d seen it earlier! cheers

By: Charlotte

Charlotte — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:27:31 +0000

Thanks for the info. Now I know where all those question marks are coming from. Good explanation.

By: » Blog Archive » Use Google for Finding Images You Can Use!

» Blog Archive » Use Google for Finding Images You Can Use! — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:31:06 +0000

[...] Lightroom Galleries with External Drives – by RC! [...]

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:45:38 +0000

Ricardo, Another approach to reducing catalog backup space is to compress them. They zip pretty well – to about 10% of their original size (i.e. 90% space saving). I’ve created a plugin ( http://thephotogeek.com/lightroom/config-backup/ ) that will do this for you without leaving Lightroom, and can also backup your presets and other configuration files at the same time.

By: Sandy Olson

Sandy Olson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:28:17 +0000

RC, Is all this to say that the actual image info. is on the external drive and are only referenced in Lightroom as a catalog file? I have not bought Lightroom yet. Still using Bridge and PSd CS3. Considering the move. Thanks, Sandy Olson

By: RC

RC — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:45:38 +0000

Ricardo:
ABSOLUTELY – I never keep more than 5 days of information of backups and I’ve changed my settings to backup once a week instead of once a day. This helps a lot. But yes.. if I know that my database has worked for a specific amount of time.. DELETE everything else. I once didnt do that and after deleting the backups I didnt need got back 40GB of space!

Anya:
For me, I would totally save the catalog file on the disk instead of an external file. Think of it this way: You really don’t permanently add anything to the file until you export or open in Photoshop.. all of the other times they are changes in metadata, and all of those changes are in those catalogs (lrcat and the data file). I’d thik that having that be accessed repeatedly over an external drive wouldnt be good.. and would mean that you couldnt use Lightroom at all without the drive plugged in.

Keep the catalog file on the hard drive, delete extraneous backups, and move your images to an external drive.. and you should be all set.

Hope those help!
RC

By: Use Google for Finding Images You Can Use! | Layers Magazine

Use Google for Finding Images You Can Use! | Layers Magazine — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:05:29 +0000

[...] Lightroom Galleries with External Drives – by RC! [...]

By: Anya

Anya — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:37:59 +0000

Hi, what do I do if I have been saving file catalogs not on my external hard drive, but on hard disk? How do I move them without loosing any information? Thank you

By: Ricardo

Ricardo — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:27:46 +0000

Hi RC:
Nice way to save space in your computer’s hard drive. Nice tutorial. What about the “Backups” folder in: My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom? How can you reduce the size of this Backups folder? Mine is 14GB (~50% of the Lighroom folder) and contain many subfolders with different dates. Can I delete the old ones without affecting my Lightroom Backup system?