Help with Lightroom

[mitchell]

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Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated. My Mac has become very slow.

 

To speed things up I've installed a second internal hard drive in my Mac. I want to copy my photos ( 117 GB worth) from my first drive (Macintosh HD) to my second (HD 2), and then erase them from my first.

 

No problem doing that, but Lightroom then treats them as new files, and asks if I want to load them into LR. If this were only time consuming, I'd do it. But, I think I'll loose all my previous LR work on the file.

 

I'm sure there is a simple solution, but like so much to do with computers, without directions, I'm lost.

 

Thanks,

 

Mitchell

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[mike_j]

To keep all your Lightroom data I think you need to use Lightroom "export" from the current drive to the new drive

 

I find Lightroom terribly slow on my pc system too - I'm thinking of giving up on it. I don't want to have to buy a new pc just to run it, much as I like some features.

[carstenw]

Mike, try turning the cache previews option to never removing the images, and the select all your images and use Library-Previews-Generate 1:1 Previews followed by standard size previews. It will cost you 10-20GB of space, but most operations will be much faster.

 

I think it was Woody who turned me onto this. A real lifesaver.

[mitchell]

Mike,

 

Thanks for your response. I very much want to avoid Export because I don't want to process the images.

 

I just want to move my images as is to the second drive to free up space on the first drive. I've tried a bunch of things, but no go. This is really driving me nuts!!!!

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

Best,

 

Mitchell

[ckthual]

Have you tried the "Export Library" option (Lightroom 1.1) ? It export your catalog (previously library) + the original files (raw or jpeg) (including the changes you made)

You should be able to copy all your images to your external hard drive, and then, when it's all OK, you can delete them from your local hard drive

 

- Make a "Metadata > save all metadata" after having selected all your pictures first to be sure all your work is saved into the metadata

- I don't advise you to use the automatic metadata saving (Catalog options), it's still problematic, and slowed my mac too.

 

Hope this helps.

[mitchell]

Cedric,

 

Thanks for your help. I'll try this later today.

 

This had really been driving me nuts.

 

Best,

 

Mitchell

[robsteve]

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Mitchell:

 

I think you can move the files and when Lightroom can't find the files, it will ask you to point out where they are. Try moving one folder of DNGs that have been imported into lightroom and see what happens.

 

In regards to moving the Library, if you move it and Lightroom can't find it, it will ask you if you want to create a new library or open an existing one. You then just have to point it to the location of your moved existing Library.

[robsteve]

I just opened Lightroom and looked at the Library and folders that I have on an external drive which is not attached show up in red. You can then right click theses folders and choose locate. From there you can point to the new location of the folder.

[mitchell]

Rob,

 

Thanks so much for your help. I've been hung up on this for a while, but now it's working and I'm freeing up lots of space on my primary drive. Whew!

 

Best,

 

Mitchell