I'm leaving home for a year and I use lightroom to process and keep photo's. I have all my photo's on drive D: and the Lightroom catalog is on C: I would like to copy all my photo's to another EHD to take with me I assume I'll need to copy the catalog from C: also. What is the best way to do this and what is the best way to format the new HD. At the moment all of this is on a windows based computer and I'm taking my MacBook Air with me which doesn't have Lightroom on it yet but I'm on the subscription program so I was going to put Lightroom on it so I could process photo's from the new EHD while I'm away.
Thanks,
Whitt
You'll need ExFAT or FAT32. FAT32 has file size limitations (individual files), so it isn't good for video.
If everything is on the external drive, then open the Catalogue file and it will all open up. (I haven't tried this, but it should be doable). I know there are some videos out there on doing this.
Another option might be to have a separate catalogue that you export from the laptop and import to the desktop. External drives can be much slower.
Remember, move the files from inside of Lightroom, not Explorer/Finder.
a6k
Loc: Detroit & Sanibel
farwest wrote:
I'm leaving home for a year and I use lightroom to process and keep photo's. I have all my photo's on drive D: and the Lightroom catalog is on C: I would like to copy all my photo's to another EHD to take with me I assume I'll need to copy the catalog from C: also. What is the best way to do this and what is the best way to format the new HD. At the moment all of this is on a windows based computer and I'm taking my MacBook Air with me which doesn't have Lightroom on it yet but I'm on the subscription program so I was going to put Lightroom on it so I could process photo's from the new EHD while I'm away.
Thanks,
Whitt
I'm leaving home for a year and I use lightroom to... (
show quote)
The FAT versions may work for you but not as well as a EHD formatted for the Mac. Your post seems to say that the EHD will be new or will be re-purposed for this use case. Therefore I recommend that you format the EHD using the Mac and for a Mac file system. The problem you might eventually have would be reading it with a Windows computer later. However, Mac and Windows can read each other's disks
when they are on a network. I share files from Mac to Windows that way routinely because my wife's computer is Windows and mine is Mac.
I would offer my opinion that the Mac file system is better but even without that, it only makes sense to use a filesystem that the computer will be using "natively". Lightroom will be able to handle it, through the Mac, just fine.
farwest wrote:
I'm leaving home for a year and I use lightroom to process and keep photo's. I have all my photo's on drive D: and the Lightroom catalog is on C: I would like to copy all my photo's to another EHD to take with me I assume I'll need to copy the catalog from C: also. What is the best way to do this and what is the best way to format the new HD. At the moment all of this is on a windows based computer and I'm taking my MacBook Air with me which doesn't have Lightroom on it yet but I'm on the subscription program so I was going to put Lightroom on it so I could process photo's from the new EHD while I'm away.
Thanks,
Whitt
I'm leaving home for a year and I use lightroom to... (
show quote)
You may need to keep the catalog on the internal drive (not necessarily the backup) certainly Lightroom on the mac refuses to work with the catalog on a network drive. Performance should be better on the internal drive anyway the catalog is a database and lightroom is reading and writing to it every time you do anything.
I had the same problem, I have an I Mac and a windows platform , Seagate has a solution it's called backup plus a 3 tb external hard drive , that is cross platform and Mobil devices less than $90.00 @ Walmart...windows 7 and higher , Mac 10.9 and higher , but works on my 10.6.8 and android 3.0 and higher . work's great...USB 3..
Be sure to format your drives to work with Windows and MAC.
I keep all my catalogs on the external drives with the photos...works for me.
Us ExFAT.... that works seamlessly on both Windows and Mac
OR you CAN use NTFS, with add-on drivers for the Mac
I had occasional problems with NTFS drives on Mac in the past so I use ExFAT exclusively on all my external HDs now
There is no need to format the drive I mentioned above just an app plug and play. .......
nikonbrain wrote:
There is no need to format the drive I mentioned above just an app plug and play. .......
That one uses NTFS and includes the drivers for the Mac... works fine if you want to trust the drivers.
I bought it and reformatted to ExFAT regardless....
nikonbrain wrote:
There is no need to format the drive I mentioned above just an app plug and play. .......
...this is a good solution (I'm assuming it works, lol). But if you don't want to spend the dough and the need arises, and one is dealing with Mac/Windows platforms (which I do daily), the best way is to format the drive in ExFat, only do that on the *Windows* computer! It just works better that way. My system is comprised of a workhorse MacBook Pro and two Windows machines (one Win 10 and the other Win 7) Networking is effective, yes, but I dunno, mine is iffy and seems to work when it wants and I think that's just the nature of Win/Mac, really haven't found the ideal network path yet. I'm thinking that Seagate is formatted ExFat out of the box, and when you have an external like that you should be able to plug into either platform with impunity...well, in theory anyway, hahaha...
bobwalder wrote:
That one uses NTFS and includes the drivers for the Mac... works fine if you want to trust the drivers.
I bought it and reformatted to ExFAT regardless....
ExFAT is great. I've never had a problem with it on *newer than 2013* devices.
burkphoto wrote:
ExFAT is great. I've never had a problem with it on *newer than 2013* devices.
And I have also had NTFS drivers on the Mac that worked fine until the next update.....
No perfect solution here! LOL ;o)
bobwalder wrote:
And I have also had NTFS drivers on the Mac that worked fine until the next update.....
No perfect solution here! LOL ;o)
Paragons ntfs driver version 12 is good up to yosemite and is free but newer than that you need version 14. I have never had an issue, they just work.
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