Using lightroom to relocate files

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morleymackam

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I've got a single catalogue in lightroom but have only recently used it to copy files to a new location on import.

My previous images are scattered all over various hard disks and I wondered if there was a way of telling lightroom to copy and organise all of it's current photos en masse?

Cheers :)
 
You have to tell Lightroom where to look for the images.

Not sure if it'll work, but you could point Lightroom to the root folder of each drive and then select that. Lightroom may then be able to scan the folders for images. It's a bit problematic as I've never tried that. If you try it I can't give you any promise of success. Might be worth making up a new test catalog and see if it works.

Personally I'd scan the drives for images and then copy them to a new location organise them and then import into Lightroom

Sorry can't be of more help
 
In the folders section of the left tool bar in the library module, you can click the + to add a folder.
 
A friend suggested exporting all of the files to a new location and reimporting. Is there any way of doing this and keeping lightroom catalogue settings? i don;t want to have to reprocess everything.
 
If they're all in Lightroom already, you can export as a catalog, with negatives and previews, then you can re-import to a new location before deleting the old catalog.

I've sometimes found though is that it imports using the subfolders from the old catalog, so you may want to try this with a smaller group of images first.

Alternatively, you can just drag the folders around in the LR interface and reorganise that way.
 
I sooooo don't get Lightroom. I really need to spend a couple of days buried in a good book and spend some time sorting my collection.
 
Scott Kelby`s Lightroom 2 book for digital photographers is a great and informative read if you need suggestions for reading material to help you
 
Martin Evening's book is also very good.

I find the best way to think of Lightroom is that it isn't anything like Photoshop, you are not editing your images, you are creating a set of instructions of changes to be made to your base images when they are displayed or exported.

Although it is possible to do it the way you suggested yesterday, with embedding the metadata (or writing to the XMP file if you aren't using DNG) moving them within the folder explorer will be a lot easier.
 
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