Moving photos to external hard drive and keeping lightroom settings?

Alright my laptop hard drive is getting full and I'm needing to move some photos off of it to an external. Last time i moved a bunch of photos just in windows. Then when I synced back up all my tags and settings were gone. I don't want this to happen again.

So am I able to to move the photos from my laptop to external from within lightroom and keep all my settings? Or is there an easier way to do this?

And also what would be better. To get a usb 3.0 external or find one with a network port on it? Keep in mind that my current router is not a gigabit router. Maybe in the future that will get swapped out but not right now.

Thanks,

Travis

USB 3.0 is WAY faster than 100Mbit Ethernet.

To keep things right in Lighroom, you need to move the files within Lightroom. Under Folders in the left column, create a new folder on the USB drive. Then drag files/folders to it in Lightroom.

mike_d wrote in post #15692917
USB 3.0 is WAY faster than 100Mbit Ethernet.

To keep things right in Lighroom, you need to move the files within Lightroom. Under Folders in the left column, create a new folder on the USB drive. Then drag files/folders to it in Lightroom.

Thanks! Man was it sucked when I lost all those settings.

First off, move them withing Lightroom -- go to your folders panel in the Library module. You will have to create a "parent" folder in the external drive and import it into Lightroom, then you can drag and drop folders into the parent folder.

As to why your metadata disappeared the last time you did a move, well if you move things in a system browser, you won't have moved the metadata by default, so if you then re-imported the images then you won't have the metadata. There are a couple work-arounds (like using the Save Metadata to File function), but for now learn to move things within Lightroom!

If you want to save the settings, export the photos as a LR catalog and move the cat file with the photos to the drive. Do this if you want to put them there for archiving vs working on them frequently. If you will still be using them frequently, then move them from withing LR as a previous poster stated.

Just finished moving some files to an old small external drive and it worked no problems. Now to search for a newer one.

Thanks!