how to export images in LR to an external drive?

My laptop only has a 256GB hard drive and its starting to run out of room. I want to transfer some of my folders of photos to an external drive. How do I export the folder to the external drive, in a way that saves the metadata and the alterations I have made to the RAW file?

In Library view, on the left side where it says "Folders" click the + and "add folder". Create a new folder on the external drive. Then you can drag subfolders from your internal drive to the external within Lightroom and it'll preserve everything.

hazwing wrote in post #15313479
My laptop only has a 256GB hard drive and its starting to run out of room. I want to transfer some of my folders of photos to an external drive. How do I export the folder to the external drive, in a way that saves the metadata and the alterations I have made to the RAW file?

mike_d wrote in post #15313485
In Library view, on the left side where it says "Folders" click the + and "add folder". Create a new folder on the external drive. Then you can drag subfolders from your internal drive to the external within Lightroom and it'll preserve everything.

Good advice. Bear in mind that you are moving the files/folders, not "exporting" them. Exporting is a different process, yeah, you can export to an external drive easily, just use the Export Location panel in the Export dialog to specify your destination preferences. Your choice will be "sticky".

But, you don't want to Export in that way if you are trying to "clear stuff off" your internal drive. You want to Move stuff.

Note that once you have Moved your files/folders using Lightroom, they will still be in your library/catalog with your edits/metadata intact. However, if you unplug the external drive, thumbnails and, I believe, previews will show up but you won't be able to edit them unless you plug the drive back in.

Thanks for the advice, exactly want I wanted to know. I was probably using the wrong terms by saying export.

So a preview and thumbnail image still remains in the LR catalogue even when the hard drive is disconnected? Do the previews use up much space on the hard drive?

Another question though. If I want to backup the files saved on the external drive, whats the best way of doing this? Can I just copy the files from one external drive to the the back-up external drive?

hazwing wrote in post #15313805
Thanks for the advice, exactly want I wanted to know. I was probably using the wrong terms by saying export.

Yeah, it's good to get those "terms" straight so that we are all talking about the same thing!

You can see how much space your previews take up by looking in your catalog folder (you can locate it using Edit/Catalog Settings and the location will show up in the opening tab dialog box). Go to that location and and you will see both a .lrcat file (your catalog/database file) and a Previews.lrdata folder for your catalog. You can see the folder size by viewing the Properties for the folder, 'course you can poke around in the folder for seeing the details. My Previews folder takes up a bit over 27 GB, not a hugh amount, but I do keep my catalog on an internal drive seperate from my "system" drive. Some folks prefer to keep theirs on an external drive. I have LR set to delete previews after 30 days.

Another thing that can use drive space is the Camera Raw Cache -- it holds your "1:1" previews (as used in the Develop module). You can view its location, purge it, or set a size limit in the Edit/Preferences/File Handling dialog. Don't set a tiny size though or it will slow down your performance...

Lightroom backs up the catalog, but not the actual images. So, as you speculated, use your system to copy the images to a backup drive..

If you do have to revert to the backup drive, Lightroom is quite "smart" about "finding" them, as long as you keep the file/folder structure the same as much as possible.

This is what I do. My catalogue is in the external drive which is backed up. I download the files onto my desktop and use DPP - Quick Check at full screen to cull and delete. I just like how the images look in DPP. I then import into LR, in LR move them from my desktop to the external drive folders I created and then proceed with editing. It is an extra step with DPP but is very quick. No matter where you import files into LR always move them around within LR.