Adding a New Disk to Lightroom

I tried to write this as a post in the tech forum to answer Paul B’s question, but I couldn’t post it, perhaps the images were too big.  Not sure.  No matter I’ll post it on here instead as a few people have asked the same question.

The steps for adding a new disk to light room are as follows and are pretty much the same regardless of whether you are running on Windows or Mac.

1. Attach the new drive to your computer, and format it if you need to.

2. Open up Light room, make sure you are in the library module and to to the Folders section on the left.  This will show you your currently connected drives.

In this case there is Macintosh HD which is highlighted and has a green light on the left.  Notice there is also a ‘data’ drive, this is greyed out because it is not plugged in but it has images on it and LR knows about it.  

If a drive has no content on it that LR is aware of it will not be shown here, and that is the issue with your new drive.  For LR to see it we must add something it knows about, in this case we will simply add a folder.

3. At the top of the Folders section is a little ‘+’ sign and if you click on it you can select ‘Add Folder…’

Once you select this you will be presented with a dialogue window that shows you all of the drives connected to your system.  

4. Select the drive you want to add and click on the ‘New Folder’ button which should be on the bottom of the drives window.

In this case I have a disk called 2TB and I will create a new folder called ‘Fotobuzz Test’ on it

5. When you have clicked on the New Folder button enter a name for the folder and press enter

6. You will now be taken back to the drives window and will be redirected to the new folder you have just added on the new drive.  Press the ‘Choose’ Button, this will add the folder to LR and as the folder is on a new drive it will add the drive too.

I now have the new drive 2TB added to LR and I can see the Fotobuzz Test folder with 0 images in it.  I can now copy images to it.

Another method is to copy some photos to the new disk and then doing an import, which will work, but if you don’t have any images to import just use this method and you will achieve the same thing.