Moving Photos To A New Drive & Lightroom/Aperture

[OliverJohnson]

I currently have a 640GB external drive that houses some of my photos on it, this drive along with 2 others are then backed up to a 2TB external drive via my iMac's Time Machine facility.

However the 640GB drive is starting to show signs of failing in that it is starting to struggle to start up (although once running it's absolutely fine and performs as new).

I can build myself a 1.5TB external drive for £99 and so am considering doing that to retire the 640Gb drive.

However I use both Lightroom and Aperture and don't know what effect replacing that drive will have on their respective libraries.

In both programs the photos are referenced files i.e. they are not enclosed in the catalogue so what happens when I bin off the old drive? I've obviously got to point the programs to look to the new drive but as this is a Mac and not a PC this new drive won't have the same drive letter (there aren't drive letters on a Mac) so this won't happen automatically.

I also think, not in front of my Mac at the moment, that either the Lightroom or Aperture library resides on the drive I want to replace so that needs to be updated too

Anyone know what the best and safest way to do all of this?

[IanMears]

You need to have both drives connected at the same time and then move the catalogue followed by the images. Manually move the lightroom directory (the one that contains the catalogue and previews) to the new drive. Open lightroom which will then indicate that it can't find its catalogue. Point it to the new catalogue location and it should open up and still point to all your existing image files. In the left hand pane there is a folders panel. Use that to add a new one the new drive. You can then just drag and drop all the files from the old volume to the new volume using the folder pane.
If you don't do it from within Lightroom usually it will lose track of the files and then you lose all the edit info etc.