Comments on: Lightroom Galleries with External Drives

By: SalukiJim

SalukiJim — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 22:58:45 +0000

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!

By: data center capacity planning

data center capacity planning — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 07:21:13 +0000

Yet another handy post, really awesome to frequent your site! Keep at it!

By: Sarah Andrew

Sarah Andrew — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 12:53:19 +0000

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?

By: George

George — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:33:00 +0000

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?

By: mark shirley

mark shirley — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:52:36 +0000

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

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:27:32 +0000

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

By: Charlotte

Charlotte — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:27:31 +0000

Thanks for the info. Now I know where all those question marks are coming from. Good explanation.

By: » Blog Archive » Use Google for Finding Images You Can Use!

» Blog Archive » Use Google for Finding Images You Can Use! — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:31:06 +0000

[...] Lightroom Galleries with External Drives – by RC! [...]

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:45:38 +0000

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.

By: Sandy Olson

Sandy Olson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:28:17 +0000

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