Storage space dilemma

[Chris_Johnstone]

Ok, I've run out of room on my internal hard drive. It was only 80gb and I have a good 22gb of photos not to mention music etc.

I have a 500gb external hard drive and another 80gb so I'm safe there.

Specifically I want to know what I can do using LR. So here's the setup and what I want to achieve:

Facts:
-all 22gb of photos are on the internal HD.
-some of which are on my website and are frequently used and so I need to keep them on the internal HD.
-I keep taking new photos that need space on the internal HD

Aim:
-Ideally I'd like to move all photos older than x months that are not used on my website or accessed frequently to the ext HD. What is the best way to go about doing this?

Chris

[colincurry]

Hallo Chris

I am far from a techie/nerd. I keep all my pics on a 500 gig separate hard drive connected by a USB2 cable and have no trouble in uploading to WAB, for example. I also back them up on DVDs.

Perhaps one of our computer wizards/witches might help further.

Colin

[colincurry]

PS

I have re-read your post and taken the point about your web site. If you have relatively few of your photos on the web site (and presumably these change from time to time), might the answer still be to store all your pics on the stand alone hard drive, but copy those you actually need day to day to your internal drive?

That's enough well-intentioned drivel from me.

Colin

[gfilmsuk]

The way I do it is to open the file from wherever it is and then save it as, to my ext HD. I always back-up to CD also.
Job done.

[Chris_Johnstone]

Yea, the options you mentioned are things I have considered and yes, the photos on the website will be changed/added to from time to time.

Unfortunately (and this might sound a bit weird) currently where I work, to have my ext HD plugged in all the time is a bit of a nightmare. I have no desk or table, I have to work with my laptop on my bed and the HD on top of a chest of drawers. A very temporary setup and not so suitable for the amount of time I spend using LR on different occassions throughout the day.

I think I will try and back up all my photos except those from the 3 months onto the ext HD but keep the useful ones available.

Thanks for the info guys. If anyone has anymore ideas let me know.

[galanthus]

I bought a 500gb la cie external drive running via firewire around 3 weeks ago. I moved all of the photos on my hard drive, around 20gb, just dragged them over to the la cie then deleted them from my pc. Lots of the pics are linked to my .co.uk website and also my .com website, they all work on the web perfectly.

[GerryNick2]

I assume when you say what can you do using LR you mean adobe Light Room. This being the case I would suggest you need to create a new or additional catalogue in lightroom, this can be on an external drive. Once created you can transfer images to the new catalogue and reference them from within Lightroom. Go to Lightroom help, index, catalogue and it takes you through the stages of creating an additional catalogue and how to access it when you have more than one catalogue.

Gerry