farwest Loc: Utah

My hard drive is about full and I was wondering what others do at this stage add another HD or move photo's to and external HD what implications does that have with my LR catalog? I know there is a few options I just don't know what works best.

Thanks

AzPicLady Loc: Behind the camera!

I have several externals and don't put photos on my internal at all. The only issue is that I don't always plug the externals back into the same slot, so I do have to tell LR where the files are. But that's easy.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Sounds like you should go into your "pictures\Lightroom\backups" folder and delete everything except the most recent date-stamp folder. This is an easy way to recover diskspace and to learn how Adobe eats space on your harddrive for no good purpose.

Assuming you also need to work with an attached external HD, you can use LR to "move" the image files to the HD. Or, you can move them external to LR and just update the LR catalog afterward.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

I store all my Lightroom images on external HDs. it leaves my internal HD almost empty

alvin3232 Loc: Houston, TX

I would move all your pictures to an external drive, that way if you PC every crashed or had any hardware issue's you would still be able to access your pictures while your PC is being repaired.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

FWIW: all my pictures are located on an EXTERNAL drive, my Lightroom catalog is on my internal drive, my applications are on my internal drive.

My internal drive is a “fusion” drive, a mixture of an SSD and a traditional spinning drive to increase speed of access, my externals are traditional spinning drives.

Be aware of the speed differences between internal and external drives - if you have a USB 3.x or Thunderbolt then external access is plenty fast, USB 2.0 or 1.1, forget it...way too slow.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Depends on the size of the hard drive.
If it's a 500Gb, I'd replace it with a 2+Tb hard drive so images are not in multiple places.
I use externals for backup.
If the computer is a desktop and you have an extra bay inside, I would put a large drive in that bay. That way tou don't have to transfer your operating system and everything else to the new drive.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

I had the same problem recently. I was using an external 4TB drive and it was full. I used a second 4TB drive as a backup to the first 4TB drive. So actually, both were full. I decided to buy an 8TB internal drive and take all the pictures from the external and copy them there. Then I purchased an external 8TB drive and did a backup of the internal 8TB drive. I redirected the Lightroom catalog to the internal 8TB drive and that's where I do my work. I backup that drive after a few shoots to the external. The old 4TB drives went in my gun safe so that all of my old work from the beginning of 2019 on back is safe. If someone swipes my computer or my house burns down I'll still have 95% of my photos in my fire resistant safe. I have about four 1TB drives already in the safe from similar backups. I'll take one out at the end of the year and backup all of 2019 and then put it back in the safe. That's my plan and I'm sticking to it.

PS- I work from an internal drive because external drives tend to "go to sleep" and when I want Lightroom to work on a certain file it always seems to pause for a really long time before I can begin work. I found this to be true even of my USB3.0 external drives. By working from an internal 8TB drive that spins at 7200RPM I don't have to wait at all.

speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

I had a hard drive full once, putting the computer's speed to a slow crowl, I moved (not copied) a shit load of files to an external hard drive, to open up space ( that completely cleared the internal one) and everything was fine again from then on! I have a bit over 14 TB of space on external drives!

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

How big is you hard drive? Do you have multiple partitions? If so, how big is each one and how much space is available on each one? How many gigs of photos do you have? Approximately how many gigs of photos to you think you add a year? And finally, is there a potential to delete other types of unused files, and unused programs. Remember, just because your hard drive may be close to full, the space taken up by your photos may only be a fraction of that total space. Additionally, perhaps the time has come to consider getting rid of some images that you will never ever look at again. I've gotten rid of a couple of hundred gigabytes of images over the years and never regretted it.

gtilford Loc: Woodstock, Ontario, Canada

My solution was this.......I have a 128 gig solid state drive that my computer runs off of, then I have an internal 2 terabyte drive that all photos are downloaded to. The photos stay on that drive but are also uploaded to Onedrive which I have 1 terabyte of space. I have Onedrive thru my Office 365 subscription for which I can run it on 5 computers. So I share that with 2 friends and we each pay $33 canadian a year for this. Each of those 5 computers get the 1 terabyte. This way if something happens to my pc there is a back up there in the cloud to restore those photos from. Now the thing is there is only ever 1 month of photos on my computer and in the cloud because every month I back that month's folder up to 2 external drives that are kept in a fireproof safe in case something were to happen the most I would loose is one months photos if both the computer and the cloud were lost. Then just buy hard drives as needed storage is cheap nowadays. I still remember backing everything up to cds now that was a pain.

farwest Loc: Utah

Right now I'm putting one copy on the internal hard drive and one as a backup to an external.

farwest Loc: Utah

I have a second copy on my external. So when I import should I import to two externals?

Bobspez Loc: Southern NJ, USA

I only keep the keepers. The rest I delete. 500GB of photos 50,000 pics, if each pic is 10MB. Who is ever going to look at 50,000 pics?

elf

Whatever you do, save important things on TWO drives. I like external, I am in no hurry. My external 2TB drive failed and so far I recovered about half of the photos. I pray that it will last until I get another as a backup.