How do I save my Lightroom edits when transferring to an external HDD?

This is probably a simple solution that I don't know of yet, but when I transfer my photos from my laptop to external storage I lose all my LR5 edits when I open them up again on the external. Are those all just saved to the catalog?

use Lightroom to move them to the external hard drive, don't drag and drop through windows.

gary....the "edits" are saved in the database by default. (You can also have them written to sidecar .xmp files too in the settings, but by default they are in the database only).

If you try to open the photo directly (from windows explorer, etc) OUTSIDE of lightroom, then the edits will not appear. You MUST use LR to see the edits. (The other option is to use the .xmp files which some other programs will read too, but the two files must be in the same directory. Even then some edits may work and some not - depending on how similar the raw processors are).

And as Higgs said above....if you want to move files around, do it INSIDE of lightroom, that way the LR database knows where they are and it wont cause issues.

If you have already moved some photo files outside of LR, you are probably seeing question marks in LR's Library. That is because LR doesn't know their new location. Right-click on the question marks
, select find photo or find folder and navigate to the files in their new home in order to update LR.

Are you trying to view them from another computer?

What I'm doing is moving them to an external HDD, then opening up Lightroom and reimporting them without moving them so they stay on the external drive. Once I do this I notice my edits aren't showing, I never open pics outside of Lightroom anyway. I'm using OSX if it makes a difference.

You move them using Lightroom, and don't re-import them. Move them with LR and they stay in your catalog and LR keeps all the editing data. Otherwise, you'll want to Save the editing Metadata to a File so that when you re-import LR will "pick up" the metadata.

You need to understand that the "files" you see in LR are only "references" to a file on disk. Let's call them "catalog files" that reference an "image file" that is (should be) on disk.

Just for emphasis: If you import the image files in a different location, LR will think they are new files, and they won't have any edits. You now have two sets of catalog files with the same name. LR thinks one is on the old location (but cannot find the image files) and a set at the new location, unedited.

At that point, you probably won't be able to re-asociate the right "catalog-files" with these "image-files", since you can't have a single image-file referenced by two files in the catalog. That's a bit of a mess, and at that point you need to stop and think.

You probably need to remove the "un-edited" catalog-files (not the image files, so do not choose "delete from disk", choose "remove from catalog"), then re-associate the edited "catalog-files" with the proper "image files" on disk.

Going back to the latest backup, from just after you edited all files, but before you (moved and) re-imported would be just as easy.