Lightroom and USB hard drives

[tonysvision]

<p>Is there a Lightroom setting that causes it to recognize USB drives by volume name in preference to the Windows-assigned drive letter?<br>

My Lightroom catalog includes images stored on a USB drive. It was initially cataloged as drive "K". At some point likely because a thumb drive or something was using that letter when I re-mounted the image drive, Windows (Vista) assigned it to "L". When Lightroom was opened it showed the drive with the correct volume name, the letter "K", and all the folders grayed out with question marks next to them.<br>

I poked around in forums and eventually was able solve the problem for the time being by re-assigning the drive letter back to "K" using Disk Manager via Contol Panel/Administrative Tools/Disk Management. Lightroom is now happy with the images located on that drive.<br>

But it seems that in view of the fact that Windows can arbitrarily re-assign drive letters, that Lightroom should be recognizing drives by their volume name or some other characteristic. The question is, is there some setting in LR that would help it recognize USB drives despite a change in drive letter?</p>

[phule]

<p>[[but it seems that in view of the fact that Windows can arbitrarily re-assign drive letters]]</p>

<p>If you assign the drive letter to something that is not likely to conflict with other devices, (for example: Z), then you shouldn't have to worry about this happening again.</p>

<p>When Lightroom prompts you to find the folders associated with the images you can easily point it to the new location (Z:).</p>

[david_henderson]

<p>I had this issue too , complicated by the fact that I use two internal drives and two external drives. I resolved it exactly as Mr Bernhard suggests, save that in my case I used the lettersC, P, T and V to designate the drives so ther was still lots of room for windows to call whatever I happen to have plugged into the USB hub whatever it wants without messing with my drive names.</p>

[tonysvision]

<p>The drive has many folders - at least 100 (for most years going back to 1893). If I now reassign the drive as Z is there a way to reassociate those folders in LR other than one by one?</p>

<p>But it just seems this shouldn't be necessary - if Windows can recognize an individual drive, so that it knows it is drive Z or whatever I've assigned, it seems like LR should be clever enough to look at the volume name or whatever also, so we wouldn't get into this mess.</p>

[phule]

<p>If your sub-folders were not in the root directory of your external drive you wouldn't need to re-associate all the folders, just the parent one.</p>

<p>Example:</p>

<p>K:\Photos\</p>

<p>K:\Photos\Folder1</p>

<p>K:\Photos\Folder2</p>

<p>K:\Photos\Folder3</p>

<p>Then you would just point lightroom to the new location of K:\Photos\ (which may be Z:\Photos\) and it would update all the children directories Folder1, Folder2, Folder(n)</p>

<p>If you don't have your image folders as children of a parent, right-click on one and choose "Add Parent Folder" You will then see a drive letter appear as a folder (Assuming you're still using K it'll be K:). When you change the external drive letter to Z, launch lightroom and right-click on the new parent directory (in your case K:) and choose "Find Missing Folder." Browse to your new drive letter and select it. Lightroom will then find all your sub-folders automatically.</p>

<p>(edit: updated the post for clarity)</p>

[tonysvision]

<p>Rob, that did the trick. It was adding the drive as a parent folder in Lightroom that fit my case, then re-assigning it as Z. Thank you very much. Finding the solution to this problem was a giant step in my gaining confidence in Lightroom, which I've been using just since the end of January.</p>

[phule]

<p>Glad to hear it all worked out. :) Enjoy Lightroom, it's a very powerful program (and I only use a portion of it.)</p>

 

[pcnilssen]

<p>Thanks guys,<br>

i experienced just the same problem with my WD External drive, and this helped! You can always count on photo.net!</p>