Your described workflow utilizing the fast internal SSD and then moving the assignment (within LR) to your external drive is just what I've begun doing. Couldn't do it before as I didn't have a large enough internal. Thanks for your vids!

Ryan, thank you so much for this video! It was so helpful to see your process. I gained a lot of helpful tips that I am excited to apply to my work. I really appreciate how you heard me out and put in the effort to answer all my questions so thoroughly. You are the best!

dude i cant bless you enough youre so awesome. this made my life so much easier after 2 years of scratching my head and losing a whole 2 year catalog. subbed and hope to see more videos from you mate 👌🏽

Thank you very much, needed this. Very clear and simple 👍

This is gold. Thank you!

This is perfect, I needed this!

Would love to see a video on your workflow between Lightroom and Photoshop!

Thank you so much. Photo organisation has been doing my head in

Very nice tutorial, thanks for sharing!!!

thank you, this is my fourth video in a row and i feel powerful with the newly learned lightroom knowledge.

Just learned the difference between Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. I think I'll need to upgrade! Thank you.

Thanks for posting this - very helpful

Thanks for the tip on importing LR catalogs!

this is awesome! super helpful!

Aye. Dope Tutorial. I'm kinda new to LR so this was good for me.

YES that first tip is KEY! Always keep 2 copies, I had to learn the hard way.

Love your strategy.

Brilliant video thanks a million

Bravo. This is insightful and helpful.

the "because I'm yolo" had me especially after you took the time to show all the copyright options lol. Thanks for a simple workflow perfect for a newbie like me!

Suuuuper helpful one. 👍

Thank you 🙏 this is very helpful

Great tutorial! I'm a recent sub after your channel popped up on my feed and I'm slowly working my way through your content; it's simply excellent stuff! I am new to Lightroom and Adobe products in general but I am starting to get into it for food photography/videography so please don't stop! About that copyright info though, how do you even go about figuring that out? Completely lost on that one...

SOOOOOOOO HELPFUL!!!!!

Very good. Thanks.

Thanks for the insights. I have tried several approaches over the years and think I settled on something similar for my personal photographs. I have a catalog for each year since I don't shoot a lot of personal photographs. After the year has passed, I create a new one. I do keep a so-called "master" catalog to easily locate specific photographs with a certain tag. As I don't want to go through all yearly created catalogs to find all images of my dog for instance. I also created a "template" catalog for each year so that I don't have to redo all the catalog-specific work (set the import settings, etc.) I used to be a big fan of the single catalog but once I got over 10k photographs in there, things started to really slow down. However, I still have a very slow master catalog since it contains everything. So I might give your "top" photographs approach a try since those are probably the only ones that really matter in the "master" catalog.

Im glad you found a strategy that works for you, but I don't know that this is great advice for most shooters. A catalog for each shoot isn't really how Lightroom was meant to be used. I can see doing it once a year but even then the performance degradation of a large catalog is minimal. I've got more than 10,000 photos in my current catalog and it performs the same as a new catalog. Maybe worth another video testing the limits.

This was a good help , I was not sure how to create a catalog or file and was not sure if I even wanted it on my desktop or external drive. This was the most up to date one I could find...I am not sure i cold be 100% wrong, but now (9/22/2021) when you create a new catalog it auto creates the folder too and puts it where you tell it. Where on this it was a two step process (create a folder on the desktop and then create the catalog). So when I clicked NEW CATALOG, it popped up with create a catalog and folder, so I had to pick the desktop and you could only have one name too. all in all I learned a lot even if LRC was updated a little over a year ago from this. The only thing I do not like and maybe I am doing it wrong. is after I move my folder off my desktop to my external hard drive, I still have to delete it off desk top. Then when I click on LRC to start it up I get a ERROR box saying they can't find the catalogs...i just open it in default and then create a new one.....I just wish it would just open up with a blank catalog automatic and you would either have to create a new one or open it up from the HD. So if you know a work around I am all ears. I just started and I am 3 days old in terms of LRC.

If your Lightroom works less than well, it isn't because of a large catalog, it is because of other things that aren't set up correctly. I have been a photographer for many years and I have one catalog and Lr hasn't slowed down in the least. Having to switch between multiple catalogs to access certain images is just too time consuming and needless. Lightroom gives you collections for the purpose of setting aside favourites or what have you, once again, within just one catalog. Efficiency speed are foremost in my opinion and creating many catalogs is just counter-productive.

Ryan, not sure if you will see this since this is an older video of yours but I have one question. So I have 2 HDD's as I do all my Lightroom editing on one of them and keep the other for storage. I just bought a SSD for faster writing speeds and I was wondering if I should just use the SSD as the drive I work off of and use the other 2 HDD's as storage.

Super helpful video! And also, the audio when you're speaking to the camera is really clear! What mic are you using?

I'm not convinced a single catalog on system hard drive degrades processing. I have 1,000's of images and don't see any performance degradation. I keep all raws on an external hard drive. Back up hard drive to another external drive. Only time consuming task is copying master catalog from main hard drive to a backup drive. I copy my images from SD drive to external drive with FInder and then import. Do not use LR COPY.

Thanks for the video, my catalogues are a mess and looking to tidy up my workflow so this was a great help as I'm a fan of simplicity. I do have a question though. When you copy the folder to the external HDD (including the catalogue and the RAW files) does LR automatically update the links to the photos, or will it still be trying to find them on the desktop's HDD? Unless I've missed a step somewhere.

Great idea, Ryan. I'm going to create a 'hits' catalogue for each year, then a master hits catalogue containing all my best images. Excellent project whilst imprisoned at home while the politicians mess with my freedom of movement.

Hey! When you have backed up your catalog in the external drives, do you delete them from your computer drive, where they are saved my default in the Pictures folder? Thanks! :)

@signature edits. When you imported the images. On the right hand side, it looks like the raws were being moved into the "Pictures" folder in your Harddrive? Should the raws not be held on the external drive to save space on the computer?

What are your thoughts on having my Microsoft OneDrive on the external drive? I would still post process on the internal drive but just save once to the external drive in the OneDrive folder which gets automatically backed up in the cloud. All my photos would also be on the external hard drive under the OneDrive folder getting auto backup. That way I don't have to have a 2nd external hd.

Love your organization skills brother. But you ran through so fast, you lose me half way through to what you're doing and where you're at

Hey, thanks for this! You say " at the end of the year this is going to be my backup hrddrive". Does that mean you keep that years work on one HD or two (one backup)?

is your WD passport the one specifically for mac or not? and do you have other external drive recommendations? and thank you for the video, super helpful!

This was very helpful! I have a question! What do you do with the photos in the internal hard drive after you are done editing the most recent shoot? I am aware that you back them up in to the external, which is a smart idea but I just do not know what to do with them after I'm done with them in light room after all of them are edited and backed them up. Delete them to make space? :(

hello, thanks for this video. there is a part where i am kind of getting lost on, its the part on when you are making your Master Best Hits, on 11:12, you already imported photos from the Arya&Kane Wedding original catalog within your externdal HD to the Best Hits Catalog on your external HD, then right after you made ANOTHER catalog on the Best Hits with the same photos that you already imported initially from Arya&Kane earlier, albeit on a different master Best Hits folder? wouldnt that duplicate the photos from the original Arya&Kane catalog AND the initial catalog created within Best Hits? causing it to eat more space in your external HD? just trying to understand the reason for this and if it will use up extra space is this strictly so that LR has quick access and you having a good organization of photos of the selected Best Hits taken from your shoots in that year? Sorry if i didnt make sense :( i really like your yolo approach haha, easy going, yet optimized..thank you in advance!

So when you clicked on import, where are you working from, external hard drive or computer?

Wow thank you! Your video is very clear and is going to help me a lot. Since recently I put more effort and time in my pictures before I just transferred them in lightroom. So I didn't make catalogs so my lrcat. files is one big file with all my edits. How can I change that? Cause I would love to storage everything like you do without losing my previous edits.

Quick question.... I already have folders like you but just with the RAWS in. I'm going to recreate my lightroom catalogues. If I were to select all pictures in one folder into the new catalogue, does that mean I don't need the original folder with the RAW in now as they're in lightroom? Or do I always need the original too?

Hey Ryan, Thanks for sharing. I just made a complete copy of my external HD using Carbon Copy. I tired to open LR on the new HD and it opened, but the catalogue could not find all the images?? Any tips. I can only assume that possibly the HD name might be mucking it up??? Is a that possible??

Interesting to see. I'm with you on the "lots of small lightroom catalogs" for speed, but i'm definitely not with you on the keeping the main catalog and files you're work on, on the system drive. The most likely thing to happen to your computer is a data corruption on the system drive. And computers now, particularly Macs, make their hard drive/storage chips so difficult to get out of the machine that if your system drive goes on the fritz you've lost it. Have you tried working from an external SSD? Seems to cover the best of all words for me - fast, easily moveable between computers, less likely to fail at any moment. Nice video though, thanks for the help.

Do you have any advice on constantly running out of mac storage? I barely have anything on my computer but the system itself takes up so much storage. I am constantly running out of space. If I work off a catalog that is associated with my hard drive, would that help?

I liked the look of this approach. But looks like you are using Lightroom Classic. Do you know if there is a way to do this in Lightroom?

Such an inspiring idea. I could also have a master catalog, then sync my master catalog with Lightroom mobile if I want to edit on the go, since LR can only sync one catalog. I could then export the photos that Im done editing as a new catalog as a backup and clear those photos from the master catalog. Right?

Nice video here’s a little heads up for the real world burn all your images on DVDs or Blu-ray for storage do not leave them on a hard drive all you need is some magnetic device and the hard drive is toast!

Hey! I am really confused with the LR catalogues, do you have any tutorial on that? I usually just drag the photos to lightroom and save them at the end.

Just bought a Samsung 2TB NVME and WD Black 8TB HDD 7200 RPM. 2TB NVME will be my LR Catalog. Small storage will force me to edit right away so I can move them to the 8TB HDD.

Best external hard drive for video editing? I do a lot of editing (on Final Cut Pro) and need an external hard drive to save all my files. Currently I am using a WD Elements 4 TB drive that works great, however I have already used 3.5 TB of storage on it. I'm looking for a new hard drive that will give me more space to save files.

Hey great video... I think I need the video for the guy who did it wrong for years and needs to untangle the whole mess! After that I can really see myself using this system or something extremely close to it. Basically my LR Catalogue is one big messed up thing right now and moving very slowly; computer HD is maxed out, SD cards maxed out... This is what happens when you give a film guy a cool digital camera and say go have fun. I like the idea of maybe going back and breaking the LR library into smaller catalogues and then starting to back those up on mirrored Hard Drives, but I just don't know where to begin... Could potentially break it up by film vs digital and going by year, problem is that I shot film for a long time and the scans don't all have the date info. I'm sure I could guess or get close enough to catalogue them. Anyways, wish me luck and thanks for this video!

The video was really good, but I felt like it was a bit on the fast side. I found myself pausing and rewinding pretty frequently. Maybe it's just because I'm not super accustomed to messing with Catalogs in Lightroom yet, I have one massive one, but it was just a bit hard to follow at times. Just a thought.

Hi, just starting out with LR , so may be a daft question , but after editing on one hard drive and then transferring to the second . How does LR hold onto the edit history ?

How do you make your second hard drive copy the first on it's own? Is that additional software? I have the two hard drives and so keen to clear LR as I can see it slowing down big time!

I'm following your method which looks great but no matter what I do, all the RAW files import to my user folder/Pictures folder. The Lightroom catalog is on the desktop using your folder structure. I want the imported RAWs to be on the desktop with the catalog file. I'm using the latest version of Lightroom Classic. Hope you can help me out, thanks!

Ive watched this video a ton and the only thing Im not grasping is how the photos within your lightroom catalog arent getting lost? I thought if you moved the folder around outside of the catalog youll end up with the scary "?". I can move them once and find the missing folder by setting the catalog to open up using the new folder within my external hard drive, but I dont understand how you can do this on a secondary hard drive (which is what Im wanting to do) without it not recognizing it the next time you open on your primary and vice versa.

Everybody works differently, but having a catalog per shoot really neuters many capabilities of the catalog..

You talk faster than my mind can comprehend. 😀

5:16 4-20 oww i see ur a man of culture

Is there a reason u upload to your computer at all instead of just immediately updating to both drives?

Let’s see those Lil Baby photos 😎

I wish I found this video nine months ago!

What if you are someone that has 4-5 shoots a week?

If I already have Premiere, Lightroom, & Photoshop installed on my computer C drive, do I have to move the programs to my new SSD? ** I want to edit on my SSD not from my internal drive. How about the files with all of my presets, files, etc.? ___ After my shoot, I want to upload my content onto the ext. SSD. From there, I want to edit all of my work from the SSD. Afterwards, I will transfer all of the finished content and files to my Archive HDD. The ext. SSD will no longer contain my files on. If I want to open the files and edit anything again, how do I do this? ___ Is this complicating things? I don't get how to make this workflow happen

How to workflow with an external hard drive: I don’t, I work on an editing drive

0:34 Let's dive in and do it 1:28 starts doing it

video starts at 3:17

Yeah I can't maintain organization. I always have shit becoming unorganized. It's obnoxious to find stuff too. Whatever. I also hate catalogs now too. It's annoying to organize in Lightroom classic

Not sure I understand. Instead of editing on the external hard drive directly, you are editing on the Mac then copying that folder to the hard drive using Finder? That goes against every other video I have seen that warns against changing locations of images and folders outside of Lightroom. How does Lightroom know where those files are when you search for them? That would seem to be a huge issue and deal breaker.

Using 4TB a month over here 🙈🙈🙈

Very good, but way to fast for someone new to Lightroom who is trying to learn how to do this for the first time.

Started out very well, but then strayed into a very fast talking, clicking of favorite photos, favorite catalogs and although he is "keeping it simple" the clicking and talking made it Difficult to follow. Also, if part of a demonstration is to show a back up hard drive, although it makes perfect sense, plug the darn thing in so its on your video, that bothered me, as you took the time to record, write and edit the video, the 2 seconds to plug it in instead of telling the viewers to pretend its there would have made you a bit more professional. ( Just saying for future videos) Thank you for the information and will come back for more views, and very nice pictures !

For a novice on the computer, this was still too advanced for me. ugh.

agree. I watched other tutorial but I can't follow. I rather keep my workflow simple :)

Can't watch more than 3 minutes - sorry, but then everything is too tiny on the monitor....

First off, WD Passport is not reliable personally. Had some really bad experience with getting this specific model. I would suggest to get SSDs

don't drop those drives!

just a little bit too fast honestly

Lol 4/20 GG

That was in no way simple. It was completely confusing

This is why we need the DISLIKE back. I think it does a disservice to creators to not get ACTIVE feedback from viewers.

I’m getting stressed watching him shake his hard drives about.

For some of us, 'click click, boom' while you talk at 100+ MPH is a pretty difficult way TO LEARN! What is so difficult for you guys to understand about the difference between EXPLAINING how you do something...and TEACHING how you do something to novice viewers? Sorry to be so critical, but this is a common error on You Tube committed by people who think they're instructing...but are really only reviewing a process that they are very familiar with. So go back and just listen...and watch...as if you had little to no experience. Better yet, find a video that has a topic that you are not proficient in...and that is explained in rapid fire mode like yours. See if you get it! If you can't understand that, then warn your target audience prior to them investing in your process orientation that they should have 'xxxx' familiarity or be at a certain experience level.

Nice vid but why do young people today all move their hands around when speaking, like they are in a street gang ? It's really distracting....and unprofessional (IMO).