Moving Lightroom preview files

Hi all,

 

I have a Lightroom catalog of over 300,000 images. The files themselves are external drives; the preview files are on the main internal drive with the OS. I'm preparing to upgrade the internal OS drive to a SSD, and then reinstall all my software, including Lightroom. I'd like to be able to migrate my preview files so that Lightroom doesn't have to re-build them all from scratch. The previews folder is about 100 GB. What's the best way to migrate the previews to the new drive and have the new install of Lightroom find them?

 

Thanks!

I'm not sure you have to migrate anything if I understand you correctly. If you do need to move them (?), just move them but I keep my previews, presets, everything including previews on the same drive.

It depends upon the size of your current drive and the SSD you purchased. When I made the transition, I purchased a SSD that was larger than my old hard drive. The SSD came with a copy of Acronis which I used to clone the old hard drive to the SSD. Everything came up and ran without any problems. No reinstallation of any software, including Lightroom 6 and Photoshop CS5, was needed.

 

If your old drive has more data then the size of the SSD, obviously this will not work.

 

I did the following:

 

1) Shutdown, opened the case, and installed a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter in a spare drive bay.

2) Installed the SSD in the 2.5" adapter and hooked it to a spare SATA port on the motherboard.

3) Boot from my old hard drive.

4) Ran Acronis to clone the old hard drive to the SSD.

5) Shutdown, disconnected the old hard drive and plugged the SSD SATA cable into the SATA port for the old hard drive.

6) Booted normally, but this time it booted the SSD, and tested.

7) Shutdown and removed the old hard drive. I am keeping the old hard drive "just in case".

 

From start to finish it took less than 1 hour. It's amazing how fast cloning goes when both devices are hooked to SATA ports.