RC talks about saving hard drive space by setting up Lightroom to save images on an external drive.
Author: RC Concepcion
Rafael Concepcion (RC) is an education and curriculum developer for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, and the co-host of Layers TV - The How To Podcast For Everything Adobe. An Adobe Certified Instructor in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom, RC has over 10 years in the I.T. and ecommerce industries and spends his days developing content for all applications in the Adobe Creative Suite. RC has held training seminars in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and recently combined his photographic and web experience to teach with famed wildlife photographer Moose Peterson at the "You Can Do It Too" workshops in Mammoth, CA and at the Voices That Matter Web Conference in San Francisco, CA. RC also writes columns for Layers and Photoshop User magazines.
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Hi RC:
Nice way to save space in your computer’s hard drive. Nice tutorial. What about the “Backups” folder in: My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom? How can you reduce the size of this Backups folder? Mine is 14GB (~50% of the Lighroom folder) and contain many subfolders with different dates. Can I delete the old ones without affecting my Lightroom Backup system?
Hi, what do I do if I have been saving file catalogs not on my external hard drive, but on hard disk? How do I move them without loosing any information? Thank you
[...] Lightroom Galleries with External Drives – by RC! [...]
Ricardo:
ABSOLUTELY – I never keep more than 5 days of information of backups and I’ve changed my settings to backup once a week instead of once a day. This helps a lot. But yes.. if I know that my database has worked for a specific amount of time.. DELETE everything else. I once didnt do that and after deleting the backups I didnt need got back 40GB of space!
Anya:
For me, I would totally save the catalog file on the disk instead of an external file. Think of it this way: You really don’t permanently add anything to the file until you export or open in Photoshop.. all of the other times they are changes in metadata, and all of those changes are in those catalogs (lrcat and the data file). I’d thik that having that be accessed repeatedly over an external drive wouldnt be good.. and would mean that you couldnt use Lightroom at all without the drive plugged in.
Keep the catalog file on the hard drive, delete extraneous backups, and move your images to an external drive.. and you should be all set.
Hope those help!
RC
RC, Is all this to say that the actual image info. is on the external drive and are only referenced in Lightroom as a catalog file? I have not bought Lightroom yet. Still using Bridge and PSd CS3. Considering the move. Thanks, Sandy Olson
Ricardo, Another approach to reducing catalog backup space is to compress them. They zip pretty well – to about 10% of their original size (i.e. 90% space saving). I’ve created a plugin ( http://thephotogeek.com/lightroom/config-backup/ ) that will do this for you without leaving Lightroom, and can also backup your presets and other configuration files at the same time.
[...] Lightroom Galleries with External Drives – by RC! [...]
Thanks for the info. Now I know where all those question marks are coming from. Good explanation.
Hi, I’ve always saved to my hard disk, now want to move to external, how do I move images (whilst keeping lrcat and data file on hard disk) and maintain the image links? export catalogue? – don’t want to individually re-link 4,000 pics!. Good tutorial – if only I’d seen it earlier! cheers
Nice tutorial RC
but what if you have a dozen filled externals you need
2 images for a job and they are on different drives
I’m moving my Lightroom library (image files and catalogs) to an external drive. Could you offer thoughts about the type of external drive(s) that should be used for a Lightroom 2 Library on an external drive? Specifically, I just purchased two external cases that give me a choice of where I move my library:
1. To a single, 2TB (terabyte) external drive in an OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro case, or alternatively…
2. To a new, 8TB external drive in an OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 RAID case (configured as RAID 5 with three 2TB drives and a hot spare, which provides 3.64TB of actual storage space). Of course, the Qx2 enclosure could be set up in other RAID configurations or even as a simple JBOD drive, but from what I’ve read, I think a RAID 5 makes the most sense. This is connected to an eSATA PCI card that has two eSATA ports, so I even could add a second QX2 enclosure down the road to expand the storage or just back up everything yet again. In addition to the hot spare, I also have a cold spare on the shelf, and may order a couple of additional, 2TB spares just to be safe.
My basic question for RAID 5 is this: would you (or do you typically) store a working Lightroom library on a RAID 5 system, or do you keep the library on a single drive and only backup to the RAID 5 enclosure?
I am in a similar situation. I am trying to decide which drive is better. I am setting up Lightroom for an institution and want to know how it can best be shared. I assume I have to copy the Lightroom project folder and the Photos folder onto a second computer (one is Mac and one is PC). As I understand it I will have to have a FAT formatted drive. In this case I have two questions a)which drive is best for both PC and Mac and b) can I just copy the Lightroom project file from one hard drive to another and have it link up with the external drive with the photos?
Yet another handy post, really awesome to frequent your site! Keep at it!
Thanks much, Rafael. You are a lifesaver! I am a newbie both to DSLR and Lightroom. I have been reading books on LR and they all say that you have to store things locally. But being a laptop user, my large archives are all kept on an external 2.5 drive, which is what I planned to do for LR. Until I found your tutorial, I was worried I couldn’t use LR because as you say, these are big big files.
Thanks again!