If you skip ahead in this video to @ 4:38 (Questions about Lightroom and Photo Management), I talk about how to archive or move your images from your internal drive to an external one. As you will see, it is easiest to move the files to the new drive from within Lightroom.
Video Tutorial – How to Move and Archive Images in Lightroom
Because you want to work on your fastest drive, many photographer put both their catalog and their working files on their internal drive. Then, as they finish with a client job, they want to archive the images to an external drive for longer term storage. This video (How To: Move & Archive Images and Export A Catalog) shows how to create a folder on an external drive and move your files to that drive from within Lightroom. Note that the first segment answers the question “What are the question marks on my images/folders and how do I relink files?”. If you prefer to skip this section, start the video at 4 minutes 38 seconds.
(This Episode was first published on 2010/03/09 but I neglected to blog about it.)
It is not possible to import images from a card and have Lightroom erase the files on the original card. Lightroom can eject the card after import and from there, you should reformat the card in camera – after you know that all of your images copied properly AND you have created at least one backup of the files.
