Lightroom 3 - Moving locations of photos and preserving them in collections

I have my catalog on an external drive to save space on my laptop (my only PC).

My workflow is to add photos to collections and edit them when I have time. I'd like to be able to develop when I'm not at home and not have to carry my external drive around.

I'd ideally like to move folders from my external drive to my laptop for which I have photos in a collection so I can edit out of home. However I haven't found a way to copy or move folders from my external drive to my laptop, and have the collections preserved.

Is there a way to do this?

Are saying that your catalog folder is on the laptop? Have your images all been iported into Lightroom?

You can move folder between the laptop and an external drive when it's convenient in Lightroom and still keep your catalog data intact. You can either just drag a folder and drop it into its destination or select it and go to the new destination, right click and choose to Move the folder to the destination. You want to make sure that all files in the folder are selected.

Yes, my catalog is on my laptop.

I did have some folders (with images in them) on my laptop and the catalog was pointing there. When I moved the entire folders to my external drive and updated the catalog to point to the external drive the photos that were moved, which were in a collection, dissappeared from the collection.

I want to keep moved photos in their respective collections.

Maybe I've done something wrong?

Move the folder *using LR*, not in the OS.

René Damkot wrote in post #11919452
Move the folder *using LR*, not in the OS.

Excellent! I'll give that a try