That’s because it not only gives you the most control over the copying operation but helps you understand exactly where to locate your pictures.
If you don’t mind doing a little bit of work yourself using Windows File Explorer or the Macintosh Finder, this is the option I generally recommend. In the end, your images will be on the external drive and also removed from your internal drive. If you have thousands of pictures, this could take a while. From the Folders panel, click on a folder that you want to put on the external drive and drag it from your internal drive to the new folder you just created.Ĭlick the Move button and Lightroom transfers everything over to the external drive, with no extra effort required on your part. The final step in moving your images from the internal drive to an external drive is to drag-and-drop them from Lightroom. This action also creates a new folder on your external drive, which you can see if you navigate to the external drive using Finder or Windows Explorer. Once done, you should see the new folder show up in Lightroom, but it will be empty. In the screenshot below my external drive is called “Untitled” and my folder is called “Lightroom Pictures.” Navigate to your external drive and create a folder on it that you can use to store your pictures. In this case, navigate to your external drive and create a new folder at that location. Then click the + button in the top-right corner and choose “Add Folder…” This is going to let you create a new folder for storing your images. Your mileage may vary though, but know that you ought to proceed with a bit of caution when using this method.įirst, locate your Folders pane on the left side of the Library module of Lightroom. If you have a lot of images (a few thousand or more), I’d recommend against this because I’ve read reports that it can become a little unreliable when working with that many files. It doesn’t involve a lot of heavy lifting on your part because you can do everything within Lightroom. This process works well if you don’t have a large photo library. I’ll walk you through each of these methods as well as the positive and negative aspects of each so you can decide which is right for you. Once you have an external drive, there are two methods for getting your photos in Lightroom copied over to it. As I write this in early 2019, a four-terabyte drive, which can hold around 200,000 RAW files or half a million JPG files without breaking a sweat, can be found for US$100 to US$150.įor most people, I recommend a simple USB-3 external drive, as it’s the most cost-effective solution and easy to backup onto another drive as well. If you take this route, I recommend one with a transfer rate of 150mb/sec (megabytes per second) and an RPM speed of 7200.