New hard drive and Lightroom3

OK, it's that time-I need to add more storage. My question is: how does this affect my Lightroom catalog? I want to add a 2TB drive and move all my existing photos to it.

I don't really know if this is the "right" way to do this, but here's what I did/do: My photographs are organized by Year/Month/Day. When I first started this system I exported each of the Year folders (with the month/day sub-folders) over to the new drive, then I reimported those catalogues into Lightroom. Then I deleted the Year folders that were on the main drive. My HD on my computer would be completely full and then some if I had all of my photographs on it.

Each year I export the last year (let's say 2010) to my RAID array. The RAID array provides two complete copies of the photos (and LR database). During the current year I have 2 copies; one on my computers HD, and one on the portable. I usually keep several years worth on the portable just so I have them with me.

if you just want to move them just copy them over to the new location and then on the current location within LR just right click on the folder they are in now and say update folder location and then select where you moved them

once your sure its all working ok then you can just delete them from the original location, of course you could just move them in the beginning and skip that step but this is a little safer

this doesn't really effect your catalog at all it just updates the pointer of where the pics are

Thanks for the answers. Tekkie: that was the method I wanted to try but wasn't sure if I would be able to update the location easily within the Lightroom catalog system. I've only had Lightroom a couple of months.....

In Lightroom, you can also drag and drop folders. So you could drag your folders from their existing location to the 2TB drive. Lightroom will move the files AND update its catalog appropriately.

tekkie wrote in post #13013893
if you just want to move them just copy them over to the new location and then on the current location within LR just right click on the folder they are in now and say update folder location and then select where you moved them

once your sure its all working ok then you can just delete them from the original location, of course you could just move them in the beginning and skip that step but this is a little safer

this doesn't really effect your catalog at all it just updates the pointer of where the pics are

This is exactly how I have done it.

You should consider running the application and files on seperate drives.

Like this.

Well worth getting Victoria's book for tips like this.