The final step in moving your images from the internal drive to an external drive is to drag-and-drop them from Lightroom.
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This action also creates a new folder on your external drive, which you can see if you navigate to the external drive using Finder or Windows Explorer. Once done, you should see the new folder show up in Lightroom, but it will be empty. In the screenshot below my external drive is called “Untitled” and my folder is called “Lightroom Pictures.” Navigate to your external drive and create a folder on it that you can use to store your pictures. In this case, navigate to your external drive and create a new folder at that location.
Then click the + button in the top-right corner and choose “Add Folder…” This is going to let you create a new folder for storing your images. Your mileage may vary though, but know that you ought to proceed with a bit of caution when using this method.įirst, locate your Folders pane on the left side of the Library module of Lightroom. If you have a lot of images (a few thousand or more), I’d recommend against this because I’ve read reports that it can become a little unreliable when working with that many files. It doesn’t involve a lot of heavy lifting on your part because you can do everything within Lightroom. This process works well if you don’t have a large photo library. I’ll walk you through each of these methods as well as the positive and negative aspects of each so you can decide which is right for you. Once you have an external drive, there are two methods for getting your photos in Lightroom copied over to it. As I write this in early 2019, a four-terabyte drive, which can hold around 200,000 RAW files or half a million JPG files without breaking a sweat, can be found for US$100 to US$150.įor most people, I recommend a simple USB-3 external drive, as it’s the most cost-effective solution and easy to backup onto another drive as well. If you take this route, I recommend one with a transfer rate of 150mb/sec (megabytes per second) and an RPM speed of 7200.
There are always going to be physical limitations when it comes to how many images you can store on a single piece of media. Storage space is fairly inexpensive, but not infinite. While this might sound difficult and intimidating, it’s quite simple and is something that anyone can easily do. One perfect solution is to migrate your entire Lightroom library to an external drive. Cloud storage is a good solution but often involves a monthly or yearly fee, and upgrading your internal drive can be expensive and time-consuming. It may take you a while to fill up a 1TB or larger internal drive even if you shoot in RAW, but at some point, you’re going to run out of space, and you’ll have to address this problem.
This can be a great solution since even laptops now have fairly generous storage options compared to their counterparts in days gone by. Many photographers put their pictures on their computer’s internal hard drive.