Adobe Lightroom - I'm switching computer - moving images

I have an Adobe Lightroom question I haven't been able to solve . . .

 

I just purchased a new computer and new hard drives to serve as my main

editing/catalog system. I am moving my all my images from my existing computer

to the new one. Currently, they are in cataloged in Lightroom and I want to

keep the metadata, etc. while moving them.

 

On the new computer, the images will be on a different logical and physical drive.

 

What I have done:

Restored from a backup onto the new computer, so now Lightroom has all the

information about the images, the images are just missing.

 

What I need:

How to "reattach" or link the folders in lightroom to the images in their new

location?

 

Can anyone help or point me out to a source that I have missed?

 

Thanks in advance and Happy New Year!

 

Jason

Do you still have your old computer working? I would backup using catalogs, i.e., first export as catalog on your old PC. This will create a directory which you can copy to your new PC. On new PC you can then open catalog and select this directory. This should preserve all metadata and history for your images.

Click on the folders in your library and LR will go find them.

Thanks for the answers to date . . .

 

Saurabh - I don't have the Disk space to to a catalog export (20K images) but saw that as a viable solution if I were to go buy a portable external . . .

 

John - I tried that, even to the point of right clicking on the folder in Lightroom (that is red because they are "missing images", then selecting the "Find", and pointing to my new folder that holds the images, but no luck. Any further detail on how you did this if you have done it?

Single click on the red folder (red because LR doesn't know where it is) then go to Library in

the LR menu bar and select Find... and LR will go find the folder. Make sure you are in

Library module. At least it works for me. I find the library pretty confusing. Understanding

what data is where is complicated. Hope this helps.

Sorry....this isn't going to work. It just looks within LR itself. I'm trying to solve this for

myself, and keep thinking I'm done when I'm not. J.

I'm not sure of your exact setup ... or whether on Windows or Mac OS X ... but I've done a

similar thing several times. I run Mac OS X.

<br><br>

- Copy the directory tree of your photo files to the volume where you want them to reside.

<br>

- Copy the directory enclosing the catalog files (and optionally all its previews in their

subdirectory ... if you only move the catalog file in its folder, Lightroom will recreate the

preview files and subdirectory). <br>

- Start Lightroom holding down the Option/Alt key. It will come up with a dialog to choose

the catalog you want to use. Use the controls provided to navigate to the catalog file and

open it.

<br><br>

Presuming that the original directory tree of image files is not accessible on this new

system configuration (due to changed in physical/logical volume space), it should show all

the thumbnails with a red indicator that says the file cannot be found when you click on

it. Click on one, use the file choosing interface to navigate to where they are stored now,

and click ok. All the files that are in this path should now turn off their red flags. If you

store your image files in a set of directory trees that do not have a common root, you have

to do this a few times to get them all.

<br><br>

What's in the Library modules "Folder" panel is essentially a file browser that directly

reflects what the database knows of the file system. Doing the update above should cause

this panel's view to change, showing the new information that Lightroom puts in the

catalog.

<br><br>

Godfrey

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