I have an old Mac G5. It still has its original 80GB HD, and also has a second internal 400 GB drive.

The 80GB holds all of my software, iTunes (which I don't want to move), and generally is about 80-90% full.

When I want to process and edit a large number of images shot with my Leica M8, I quickly run out of room on the 80GB drive.

What can I do to set up Lightroom so that it automatically stores the files I'm editing on my 400GB drive--which still has plenty of available space?

Can't figure out how to accomplish this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure what the difficulty is here. When you import images into Lightroom, say from a CF card, you can tell Lightroom to add photos to the catalog from their current location, or move or copy the images to a specified location and add them to the catalog. All you need to do is specify the drive/ folder location where you want to store the images and Lightroom will put them there.

Mike.

I would add that using a Mac with only 10-15% of HD space on the boot drive is not a good practice. I understand that you don't want to move your iTunes library to your other drive.
You could simply purchase a larger new HD and use Carbon Copy Cloner (free) to clone your 80GB to the new drive. I don't know where you live but HD prices are really low, around $60 for a 500GB.

Back to your problem, wolfnowl is right, when you import your photos, Lightroom gives you the choice of copying files from your memory card to any place you choose on your HD.

By the way, if your Lightroom library is located on your boot drive, you might also have a space problem as previews generated by Lightroom will eat the space very quickly.

Whenever possible, keep all your image files and LR catalog on a disk other than your system drive. I'd strongly recommend that you move everything to the 400 GB external, under one top-level folder. Call it My Photos, or whatever... this makes moving and syncing easier.

If you're nore sure how to migrate all your files to another HD, I have a quick writeup about it on my blog.

Be careful... and Good luck!

Hi Mike, thanks for the response. I typically come back from shooting and download from SD cards straight into an external hard drive with plenty of room (1.5TB). When I open LR, I guess I'm importing the images I want to review from the external to my main internal drive. How do you tell LR where you want to add photos to or from--i.e., how do you specify the drive folder location to store the images? That's what I'm not sure of.

SP

Nat, thanks. That makes perfect sense, only I don't know how to tell LR to do what you describe. Thanks. SP

Thank you Francois. It is always good to write to someone in Switzerland, where my wife's family is from (Bulle, Vevay, Lausanne) and one of my favorite places. I do have a drive available that I bought sometime ago--160GB, so I may try to move all the data from my A drive over to it and make the 160GB drive my new main drive--as long as I don't have to reinstall all my software.

Thanks for the response,

SP

I'm not sure if you're using Mac or PC, but in Windows, you go to File/ Import from Disk, assuming you're importing the images to your hard drive from an external drive (or File/Import from Device if you're using a card reader) and where it says "Look In" you navigate to your external drive. For the sake of argument let's say you have a C: drive (limited space) and a D: drive (lots of room) in your computer and an external hard drive, which we'll call the E: drive. You highlight the image or images you want from the E:, and select 'Choose'. That opens the next step, where Lightroom asks you (under 'File Handling') if you want to import the images to the catalogue from their current location (i.e. the images stay on the external drive), or if you want to move or copy them to a new location. In this example we'll select 'Copy files to a new location and add to the catalog'. You can also convert them to .dng if you wish. Under that is 'Copy to location, and when you click 'Choose', you tell Lightroom where to copy the files, which in this example is the D: drive. Navigate to where you want to put them, select all or some of the images you're shown as well as the other develop, metadata, etc. settings you want, and click Import. Lightroom will either add these images to an existing folder in the catalogue or create a new folder listing in the Library, depending on whether or not that folder alreadys exists in the Library. What the Lightroom catalogue is doing is creating and maintaining a dynamic link to these files at their new location on your D: drive. All clear as mud?

Mike.