Moving picture from laptop hard drive to larger external hard drive

Question

I am not changing anything in my system.  I am using windows 7 and will continue to.  No change in elements version (10).  Please give me a step by step instructions on how to move my pictures from my computer hard drive to an external hard drive (this will NOT be a back up) but the primary locaton for my pictures.  I will keep elements program on my computer and when I want to work on my pictures or download more pictures from my camera  I will connect to the external hard drive. 

Answer 1

Jan9368 wrote:
A few questions
When I drag and drop my pictures am I looking at my pictures in elements organizer?
No, there are two ways to see your folders in PSE11 and PSE12 :
By default, it's the 'My Pictures' view. It shows a flat list of all the folders containing images registered in the catalog; all the folder of the last level, without the tree organization. You may have missed (like many, many users...) the 'Pictures' view which you obtain in clicking on the small yellow icon in the title bar of 'My Pictures'. You are shown all your folders and subfolders, all your different drives. It's very close to the folder view of Windows explorer, and you can do most of the operations you would do in the explorer.
You'll understand better if you take the time to play with the 'Pictures' view, where you can collapse or expand subfolders, or right click to show 'display all folders' when they are collapsed.
Let's say you have all your pictures under the default 'Pictures' folder of Win7. You should see the list of your drives in the lower part of the same left panel.
I suppose you don't want to change the default 'Pictures' location in Win7. If your external drive has the letter F:, you'll create a new master folder : 'F:/My Pictures bis' for instance. To test the process, you'll select one of your folders under Pictures, drag and drop on F:/My Pictures bis. Then you can check the result by viewing your pictures in different order, by testing your tags, albums etc. All should work exactly the same as before as long as your external drive is plugged in. (If it is not, you'll get 'missing files' warnings which will disappear if you plug in your external drive).
When you are satisfied with the process, you can move other folders (their subfolders will follow).
You could move only the upper level 'Pictures' folder of Win7 in a single step, but you'll feel more secure by doing this in several moves, since moving a big amount of files takes a long time (not longer than a move via the explorer,  moving a library of 150 GB like mine requires maybe 2 hours...)
Since you are on Win7, be sure to give all the access rigths to your external drive...
Another Windows trick : the catalog will remember and register the letter drive, F: in our example.
If you plug-in another  accessory in the meantime and the drive is now assigned G:, you'll have problem.
The best way to avoid such a case would be to assign a letter like M: so that your external drive will be recognized in all cases.