# LIGHTROOM CC2019:  How do I SAFELY relocate Lightroom to an external drive?  HD FULL.



## rwilson (Jun 28, 2019)

I recently started using Lightroom version: 2.3 [ 20190502-0902-47ed471 ] (May 3, 2019) on two iMacs, a Mac iBook, and two iPhones.  Prior to this, I have relied on Apple Photos, with two separate libraries that I am hoping to merge as well as numerous sources of imagery that I am hoping to finally get organized.

I started by migrating my Photos library and began creating a range of folders and albums and sorting imagery into these. However, very quickly this caused my internal HD to become full. I then adjusted settings and designated an external, 4TB drive as the local storage destination. As soon as I did that, it appeared that the system began to migrate files there, so I left it alone. However, the HD remains full. All past imports are still on the (old) internal HD, with only new adds being redirected to the new external drive.

I am attempting to merge two distinct Apple Photos libraries, and when I started the migration from the second, the system stopped the migration, saying the FD Does not have enough space to complete the operation.  The only "solution" I could find was "free up space on your HD."  This is mildly maddening because space was filled up by Lightroom itself.  So I took the precaution of COPYING the original Lightroom files, as well as the Apple Photos library, to the external drive.  My intention is to now DELETE these files from the Internal drive, thus making room for the migration, but -- obviously -- there will then be no Photos Library to migrate, except the one on the external drive.

Catch-22?

I haven't slept much so this entire post may be symptomatic of sleep deprivation psychosis.  But the question remains:

How do I SAFELY migrate my Apple Photos library to a new Hard External Drive, and reset Lightroom CC to store my files only on that external drive?

Thanks.

Rob



Lightroom version: 2.3 [ 20190502-0902-47ed471 ] (May  3 2019)
Operating system: macOS
OS Version: 10.13 [6]
Application architecture: x64
Logical processor count: 4
Processor speed: 2.5 GHz
Built-in memory: 16,384.0 MB

*Hardware Overview:*
  Model Name:    iMac
  Model Identifier:    iMac12,1
  Processor Name:    Intel Core i5
  Processor Speed:    2.5 GHz
  Number of Processors:    1
  Total Number of Cores:    4
  L2 Cache (per Core):    256 KB
  L3 Cache:    6 M
  Memory:    16 GB
  Boot ROM Version:    85.0.0.0.0
  SMC Version (system):    1.71f22
Real memory available to Lightroom: 16,384.0 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 1,168.2 MB (7.1%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 1,892.5 MB
Memory cache size: 629.8 MB
Internal Camera Raw version: 11.3 [ 197 ]
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 3
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX
Camera Raw virtual memory: 306MB / 8191MB (3%)
Camera Raw real memory: 306MB / 16384MB (1%)
Displays: 1) 1920x1080

Graphics Processor Info: OpenGL: AMD Radeon HD 6750M OpenGL EngineCheck OpenGL support: Passed
Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Version: 4.1 ATI-1.68.22
Renderer: AMD Radeon HD 6750M OpenGL Engine
LanguageVersion: 4.10
Total Video Memory: 512 MB


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