worldcycle Loc: Stateline, Nevada

I had a problem that was driving me nuts and I have noticed others have the same problem. I store all my Lightroom data and images on an external hard drive that I switch between my desktop at home and my laptop when I am traveling or on the road. I would get frustrated to no end because of the drive designations on the two computers. The desktop was drive G: and the laptop drive D:. Because Lightroom is installed on the computer itself, it searches for the files on the drive that it believes they are assigned to. Two different computers, two different drives, one would always end up with several thousand question marks and exclamation marks and no images to be found.

The answer is to change the drive designation on both computers to match. Easily done. To do it (Windows 10), plug your drive into both computers to discover which drive runs them in "This PC" Then decide if you need to change one or both (no problem, it is the same process on both). With hard drive connected to one computer that needs changing, right click on "Windows Start Button" in bottom left hand corner. Then click on "Disk Management" Chose the drive your external drive is on and right click. Chose option "Change Drive Letter and Paths for (whatever the drive letter is). It will be highlighted in blue. Click below it on the "Change" option. It will then give you the entire alphabet to choose from for drive designations so between your two machines you should be able to find one that can be dedicated strictly to your external hard drive. Hit "OK"and you are done

Now that I have done this, frustration gone. The drive and all my data and images can be interchanged flawlessly between the two computers that Adobe allows you to load Lightroom on.

superdadplano Loc: Dallas, TX

Great! Thanks for sharing

Jimmy T Loc: Virginia

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

I don't remember seeing a post about this, or I would have told you what to do. But you figured out out.

via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP

LrC uses text to link up, images or hard drives.

11bravo

One other tweak: It's rare for windows to lose track of an assigned drive letter even when a drive is removed and reattached (dismount and mount). Now my memory... so I include the preferred drive letter at the beginning of the volume name (right click Properties). Windows displays the assigned drive letter at the end of the volume name in parentheses. Now it's a quick glance to confirm the drive is where I want it. If not, easy to bring up disk management tool to correct.

For my archival storage, my drives' volume names are original mount point (drive letter) and the drive's serial number. This info is on a label on the front of the drive. Makes it easy to find the drive in a storage case along with my catalog program WinCatalog (www.wincatalog.com), and to identify any problem drives in my monitoring programs, Hard Disk Sentinel and StableBit Scanner.