Moving catalog & photos to EHD

[webmom24]

I've read a bit about issues related to moving photos from a internal hard drive to an EHD but I'm still not exactly sure what the steps are to accomplish this safely. Like many others, I have a relatively small HD on my new laptop and have a LaCie 250 GB EHD that I would like to store my photos on. Can anyone tell me the best way to accomplish this without losing my tag info, etc.? Thanks again for your help.

Webmom

[AngelicKim]

Webmom and welcome. I can't answer your question as I don't use the Organizer. I just wanted to welcome you and bump up your thread so someone will see it that can help.

[jlwilm]

Hi Webmom,

What operating system are you running - WinXP, MAC, ?

Instructions will probably vary, so need to know. I have suggestions for WinXP but am not sure that they apply to any other OS.

For XP you can move your my documents folder entirely to the USB/EHD drive and then copy the catalog from where Adobe hides it onto the USB, open the copied catalog and you are off to the races. This is a neat function and allows you to shuffle your entire My Documenst off and gives you full portability from your laptop to and other system.

Let me know if you are WInXP and I can offer more detailed instructions

[NickLewis]

Hi Webmom, and welcome to the forum :)

There are two issues - moving your catalog and moving your photo files. There is no reason at all why you should lose any Organizer data.

The catalog is like a card index of your files, and is relatively small. By default, it is stored on your C: drive, and there isn't really any need to move it for space reasons.

The space benefit for you will come by moving your photo files themselves to your EHD. You can do that relatively easily, but it is a process that needs some care. The reason for this is that you want to avoid letting significant numbers of your photos becoming "disconnected". This means that the catalog has lost track of where they are, and they need to be reconnected. PSE Organizer contains a utility to do that, but it would be sensible not to let everything become disconnected at once.

Of choice, I would do the move entirely within Organizer, rather than by using XP's functions like Explorer, because Organizer should then keep track of where your photo files are, and the disconnection issue goes away. (As you are using Organizer, you're presumably on a PC. I'm assuming you're on XP not Vista, but the same concern would apply anyway.)

Go into folder location view, and drag photo folders from their current location to where you want them on your EHD. Do a small number of folders at a time only, and then check that everything is working correctly and that the catalog is still connected. Then do some more. I really wouldn't recommend moving large numbers of photos in one fell swoop. If it works, all well and good - if there are problems, you'll have a mess to sort out.

There are a couple of other issues you should take care over.


The first is that if at all possible you should backup your photos before starting to move them. A power cut or other problem in the middle of a move operation could easily cause you to lose your photos.

The second is that Organizer will get confused in future if the drive letter assigned to your EHD changes. Does this happen to you, or is your EHD drive letter stable? (It's perfectly possible to sort this out, however.)


Post back with queries,

Nick

[webmom24]

Hi John and Nick,
Thanks for your help. I am actually running Vista Home Premium, a recent upgrade. Nick - your instructions make perfect sense. Frankly, I'm not sure about the drive letter issue. I've not really used my EHD but once or twice and didn't notice. Do you suppose I can experiment by hooking it up and unhooking it a couple of times to see what happens? If the drive letter does change is there any way to make it so it doesn't or what would you suggest if that is the case?

Thanks again,
Maureen (aka Webmom)

[webmom24]

Nick,
Quick question - how do you get into the folder view? I think I have it correctly where the folders are all listed down the left side, but I'm confused as to how to move more than one folder at a time. It won't let me select more than one and with HUGE numbers of folders it's going to take me forever to move them all.

Thanks for any help.

Maureen

[jlwilm]

Maureen, Nick . . .

I take back my comments, Nick is right – especially if you have a large investment in the extended use of the organizer with version sets, RAW images, and probably a couple of others. Mea Culpa.

However, I don’t understand the Vista, small disk configuration possibility – unless it was an upgrade from a barely made it older laptop.

Better safe than sorry, so follow Nick’s recommendations. As to where is Folder View is, I think it doesn’t get better that a large number of folders, one at a time – Windows Explorer I know how it handles this stuff, Organizer – not a clue.

There have been some recent threads discussing the loss of images when messing around with drive letter assignments, but no rational explanation. There always is, but it is frequently difficult to recognize them. In my experience, it doesn’t happen. Period. Whenever you start something like this, you need a just in case, reliable backup. Again, most people think they have it, and then sweat the details when it is crunch time.

I have been using my current system for about a year and by chance or providence, made a good decision to partition my drive (300Gb) into a couple of partiyons – C: for the Operating system, E: for data and put My Documents on the D: drive before I ever got involved with PSE4 on that system. I was also shooting only jpeg and had no problems migrating from old to new system. Somehow jpeg seems to retain the Tags, and that is all I used (being an old DOS dog, I prefer to manage my own versions by arcane methods). BUT, doing it this way made it a piece of cake to copy the My Documents and the PSE4 catalog to a USB/EHD and take them to my later acquired portable system with full access to all of my images.

I use SyncToy to handle the two environments, but only let the master or left side drive handle the catalog. I get an incremental backup, can migrate stuff, edit and update images (and all of My Documents) on the portable and then sync them back to the system when I move back. I have the system hard disc back up and an active backup on the portable.

The secret was in getting the USB/EHD to be recognized on the portable by the same drive letter as the main system and in having the catalog being contained on the partition where I stored My Documents on the left side system.

Works like a charm!

[NickLewis]

Maureen,

I've no experience of Vista, but in XP, drive letter assignment was something of a black art, as John implies! Basically, drive letters get reassigned if other competing devices are attached. This is less of a problem if your EHD is always powered up with your laptop than if it is sometimes left off.

In XP, you can set drive letters in the Disk Management section of the Computer Management utility, but I don't know what the Vista equivalent is. Usually, if the disk has a high letter, it is less likely to be disturbed by other accessories being connected.

Yes, you're in folder view, and it will only let you select one folder at a time, so if you've got a very flat folder structure, it will be tedious, I'm afraid. Which is partly why some people move files outside Organizer, but you then have to deal with the disconnection issue. Some people have no trouble reconnecting, others have problems.

One thing I didn't mention was that, before you start, you should do a File>Catalog>Recover operation to make sure that the catalog is in good shape. (This would be done automatically if you use PSE's Backup routines, but not if you paddle your own canoe.)

[webmom24]

Hi Nick,
I don't know where the Disk Management area is in Vista either. The drive letter that my system is assigning the EHD is consistent. I think just to be safe I will always hook it up when I'm going to work with photos, and be particularly careful not to have any other drives connected when I do this. While Vista seems to be consistent with the drive letter I wouldn't want to risk having a flash drive inserted before the EHD was fired up. After trying to move the folders through the folder view, I finally decided to try "restoring" the backup of the catalog I'd just made to the EHD. It seems to have worked great. The only thing is when I did this I also moved my catalog over to this drive. A few of my photos seem "funky" - all pixelated. I don't remember having photos that looked that bad on my computer before but it's possible. Also I don't see a higher resolution image of these photos so that concerns me a little. All in all I think this worked pretty well. Thanks for the help. Now I just have to buy some more DVD-RWs to do a new backup onto - I now need 5 DVDs to hold my collection.

Maureen

[NickLewis]

Hi Maureen,

I'm glad you've been successful.

I suspect the pixelation is a problem with your thumbnail cache, which has not yet completed rebuilding. It's a separate file and is not restored in a backup operation.

The rebuild will proceed while Organizer is idle, but you can force a rebuild by selecting all your photos and then choosing Update Thumbnails for Selected Items from the right-click menu.

Go away, have a cup of coffee - or perhaps even an evening out - while it's doing it. ;)

Nick