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I have around about 200GB worth of photos I'm currently using in my catalogue. I'm using an external hard drive to store them and access through Lightroom and then when i do more edits in Photoshop. I'm wondering if an external hard drive would slow down the process at all? I've just got a few 1TB drives and am just about to put the whole library of photos over to one of those. Is there a better workflow? I get my photos and put them straight to the external drive and then sort and edit them from that in Lightroom and in photoshop.

My second question is, does anyone know the best way to transfer the photos to the new drive? I know you can just grab the photos in the Library module and drag them to the new drive, but is this the best way?

Thanks everyone!

My whole Lightroom catalog and the images in the catalog are on an external drive. It might be slower, but not so much that it is annoying. I prefer having them all in one place.

As to moving them, here is one suggestion: http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00N4Ck

How slow access to your files will be depends upon the type of interface that your external drive enjoys.

For instance, USB 1.1 would probably be too slow for any sort of practical use.

Many modern motherboards now provide eSata, and if you can use this, then access speeds should pretty much be the same as for any internal drive.

USB 2 and firewire will be somewhere in the middle of this.

Speed will depend on the speed of the connection to the external drive. I use a mixture of USB and Ethernet drives and there are noticeable differences in performance across them. I have not done any tests though so am unwilling to even say what is better. Personally I do my edits on the C: drive then move things off.

Assuming a Windows box, I don't think you can beat the old DOS XCOPY command to move the files.
Andrew's tip says how to reconnect lightroom after the copy is made, but

XCOPY SourceDir\*.* DestDir /S/E
will Copy everything with a minimum of fuss.

XCOPY SourceDir\*.* DestDir /S/E/V
will also verify after the copy, but it takes twice as long.

You would then need to delete the originals though.

YOu can also just use Windows Explorer to do the move, but it will take longer as it also updates the GUI, and AFAIK you can't do a verify.

Thanks guys!

I'm really tempted to move to a non powered USB 2 drive i just got hold of, but am a bit worried about that. I'm not sure why, but it just seems like it might not be as fast/stable as a powered one.

I'm using all USB 2 drives except for a firewire 800 drive, so I'm hoping that's ok.

I see a bit of slow times but I'm not sure if it's the work I'm doing or the connection type of the HD's.

I'll be moving to a Mac Pro early next year so hopefully that's all internal drives!

Well i have moved over to the portable drive. So far i have got a bit of slowdown, but I'm not sure if that's because of the drive or the amount of work I'm doing right now. Hopefully it's not the drive, because this workflow is the best. I take my laptop to the big jobs and when i have a break i throw a fresh CF card in the camera and load the used one up. Whenever i get a break, i go and do some work on them. It's awesome, but it does seem a bit slow.

You have backups right?

Keep multiple copies.

I use a RAID1 array in my main machine. (Hardware redundancy - not a backup, if I delete it, it's gone).
Periodically copy all photos to another drive that is stored offsite.
About to put a drive in another computer on the network which will auto copy roughly once a week.

Hard drives are sooooo cheap these days you would be insane not to have a heap of copies.

There are many great sync programs that might help with the external drive problem. Have a program auto sync to your desktop when the external is plugged in.

Here is my backup strategy: How I backup my photographs.

pippin88 wrote:You have backups right?

Keep multiple copies.

I use a RAID1 array in my main machine. (Hardware redundancy - not a backup, if I delete it, it's gone).
Periodically copy all photos to another drive that is stored offsite.
About to put a drive in another computer on the network which will auto copy roughly once a week.

Hard drives are sooooo cheap these days you would be insane not to have a heap of copies.

There are many great sync programs that might help with the external drive problem. Have a program auto sync to your desktop when the external is plugged in.

Yeah i have two backups. That's what started this whole buying hard drives thing last week. I was a bit worried one backup wasn't enough so i went out and splurged for some more.

I just want the most efficient workflow, with the best portability for now, before i get a desktop machine.

ATJ wrote:Here is my backup strategy: How I backup my photographs.

Thanks for that Andrew. It's nice to see you're pretty thorough with your backups. I'm pretty slack i have to say. I have only really just started to backup properly now. I use to think i was safe because i have pretty much everything online, but i just realised how much of a pain in the ass that is to get back!