- Best external hard drive for macbook pro 2015 cyber monday install#
- Best external hard drive for macbook pro 2015 cyber monday upgrade#
Once you have copied the catalog and preview files to the new computer and connected your hard drive containing the photos from your library (or otherwise transferred them to the new computer), you can open the catalog in Lightroom.
Best external hard drive for macbook pro 2015 cyber monday install#
It the photos are on an internal drive of the old computer, you will need to perform a file transfer to an external hard drive (or physically remove the hard drive and install it in the new computer). Transfer PhotosĪssuming you have your actual photos from your Lightroom library on an external drive, transferring those photos is as simple as connecting the external drive to the new computer. Alternatively, you can put them in a custom location if you have a reason for doing so.
Now that you have your catalog and (optionally) preview files on thumb drive or external hard drive, connect that drive to your new computer and place them in the same file path as you found them on the old computer. Transfer the Catalog and Preview Files to the New Computer Depending on how many images are in your library, these files could range from hundreds of megabytes to several gigabytes in size. (Note that Lightroom will not automatically build Smart Preview files though.) It can be a time saver if you need to get to work right away and don’t want to wait for your entire library to generate preview images. This is an optional step because Lightroom will automatically build preview files when you import your old catalog onto a new machine. You will find these files in the same location as your catalog file from Step 1.
Copy Your Preview FilesĬopy your Lightroom 5 Catalog Previews.lrdata and Lightroom 5 Catalog Smart Previews.lrdata (again, or whatever your catalog name is) onto a thumb drive or external drive. Clicking the “Show” button will open that location in Finder (Mac) or Explorer (Windows). You can then see the file path where your catalog is stored on your computer. To find your catalog, go to Lightroom > Catalog Settings... > General. Locate and Copy Your Lightroom CatalogĬopy the Lightroom 5 Catalog.lrcat (or whatever name you’ve given to your particular catalog) file onto a USB thumb drive. Follow these steps and you will be able to pick up right where you left off with your old machine. It’s a fairly straightforward process actually. As a result, you will want to take your Lightroom catalog along with you to the new computer. As such, the Lightroom catalog does not contain the actual photo files, but rather data concerning organizational and processing actions you’ve made while working with your photos inside Lightroom.Īnd simply plugging in a hard drive that contains all of your photos from your Lightroom library won’t carry over your final edits.
Lightroom works by using catalogs that contain processing info related to the images in your Lightroom library.
Best external hard drive for macbook pro 2015 cyber monday upgrade#
Accordingly, when you upgrade your computer to something newer and faster, you will want to take advantage of that improved speed and begin using it for your image processing workflow. Of course, you also don’t want to lose access to all of the images you processed on your old computer. If you have been using Adobe Lightroom for very long, you might be in the situation where your image catalog has outlasted your current computer.