Storing LR catalog on an external SSD with images is not working out

[Chris Summers]

I took advantage of a Cyber Monday special on Amazon and got a 4 TB Samsung T7 Shield drive. I moved my entire image archive over to it as well as a copy of my LR catalog to work off of. I had seen a few YouTube videos that claimed it would run super fast this way. I do find it very fast but here's the problem. If I have LR open but taking a break the SSD goes into sleep or hibernate mode. Then I get an error message from LR that it can not find the catalog and must be restarted. When I restart it says it has to check the integrity of the catalog as it was not shut down properly. Takes a minute or so and then opens. I'm thinking I will just move the catalog back to my C drive.

 

[David Stallard]

Don't know the unit but is there not a way you can turn off the 'auto shutdown / sleep' just a thought

 

[Archibald]

Yeah, you should look for a way to prevent the SSD from going offline. I had that problem with an external drive that was plugged into a USB port. I thought the USB card was faulty. But that was not so. It was configured to go offline after some idle time. I went in and changed the setting, and after that it was fine.

I had the LR catalog and image files on an internal hard drive for many years and that worked well too.

 

[Kerro]

I use 2 x 1TB Samsung T7 drives and a 2TB one for all my images from my cameras. I always get rid of the programs that come with the drives and never install their software. I just use them as normal USB drives. In LR and PS Beta I have never had an issue with the drives going offline. They are very quick and move my images around at great speed. My LR cat file still sits on my C drive though.

 

[dgphoto8]

I took advantage of a Cyber Monday special on Amazon and got a 4 TB Samsung T7 Shield drive. I moved my entire image archive over to it as well as a copy of my LR catalog to work off of. I had seen a few YouTube videos that claimed it would run super fast this way. I do find it very fast but here's the problem. If I have LR open but taking a break the SSD goes into sleep or hibernate mode. Then I get an error message from LR that it can not find the catalog and must be restarted. When I restart it says it has to check the integrity of the catalog as it was not shut down properly. Takes a minute or so and then opens. I'm thinking I will just move the catalog back to my C drive.

I’m hoping there is a setting that can help you, but if not, a solution I used about 10 years ago to keep USB-connected hard drives from sleeping was a utility that wrote/overwrote a small 1 kB file to a specified place on the eternal drive at an interval to keep the drive from falling asleep. I‘m almost sure that it was called “NoSleep” but I’m not at my computer to see if I still have a copy of it, since I have an internal Raid 1 system that doesn’t have this problem.

 

[PKM-UK]

Hi Chris,

Similar to other responses, I have my images spread across 2x external SanDisk 4TB Extreme PRO Portable SSD (1 drive holds our older image files, the other has the more recent files). The LrC catalogue sits on one of the external SSD and can see/ access all of the images without any apparent 'sleep issues'.

Adobe don't have a problem with either the catalogue or your files being on an external drive (but you cannot store the catalogue on a networked drive).

I have tried various permutations, such as having the catalogue on the internal SSD with image files held on external SSD's (and even with the image files I was actually working on being temporarily held on the internal SSD), but I couldn't discern any performance differences and it added uneccesary complexity.

I'm not sure where this takes you, but it should give you hope there is a viable solution to your problem.

(My system: MacBook Pro M1 Max, macOS Sonoma 14.1.2, LrC 13.0.2).

Phil

 

[Kerro]

Chris, I did a bit of net research and came up with this

How do I store Lightroom catalog on external SSD?

You simply copy the entire catalog folder to the SSD, and then you start Lightroom once by double clicking the catalog file on the SSD so Lightroom knows where to find it. Make sure that in the Lightroom preferences you set the catalog to open to 'Most recent catalog'.


Hope it helps.

 

[Jake Shoots Birds]

Been using this system for a while. Seems like it's a device setting and not necessarily something with Lr. Your reference to "C Drive" tells me my MacBook experience isn't going to help much, but I'm thinking in the Windows power settings there's something for how long before disc drives sleep. Perhaps changing that to "Never" will fix it.

 

[Jake Shoots Birds]

Ohh!! ... And I see Phil mentioned this. On reread of your post I see that you have the catalog on the external as well. THAT is likely your issue, even if you manage to solve the drive going to sleep. Keep the catalogue local and the files it accesses on an external and you should be good.

 

[Only RF]

I've aways stored may files on a powered external drive and my catalogue and previews live on the HD which is an SSD. I always import files into LrC off my desktop because because previews are built faster. After the previews are built using LrC I drag that folder to the external drive.

Since the catalogue is just a database it is small. For 100,000 files it may be around 1.5GB. While previews take up some space I never delete them so when I want to access an older file it just snaps in. LrC is a parametric editor so edits are recoded to the catalogue which lives on the faster SSD drive.

 

[Only RF]

Some may find this interesting. I follow it pretty closely. Some say turning autowrite XMP off makes no difference but I can't stand them so I turned it off. Valuable for others, clutter for me.

Someone another site someone mentioned turning Lens Corrections off before doing multiple edits. LrC being a parametric editor has to start over from the beginning for each edit you add. Since the performance improvements over the last few years I've done 75+ edits including masks and not even an hiccup so I leave it on.

https://helpx.adobe.com/ca/lightroom-classic/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

This is important too.

Must Know ISSUES With LIGHTROOM AI DeNoise

Must Know ISSUES With LIGHTROOM AI DeNoiseBefore using Lightroom AI Denoise again, make sure you understand exactly what it’s doing to your photographs becau...

www.youtube.com

 

[Jake Shoots Birds]

Some may find this interesting. I follow it pretty closely. Some say turning autowrite XMP off makes no difference but I can't stand them so I turned it off. Valuable for others, clutter for me.

Someone another site someone mentioned turning Lens Corrections off before doing multiple edits. LrC being a parametric editor has to start over from the beginning for each edit you add. Since the performance improvements over the last few years I've done 75+ edits including masks and not even an hiccup so I leave it on.

https://helpx.adobe.com/ca/lightroom-classic/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

I'm with you on both of these. If I had to use a computer without Lr to access my raw files (which I don't) then I could see having them, but otherwise they're just one more thing to get lost along the way. As for Lens Correction, I make sure it and my default camera profile get applied on import, even though that gets completely ignored when I invoke DxO Pure Raw 3, which is about 80-90% of the time. I lose time on import and preview creation, but that's been much less an issue since I upgraded my MacBook at the beginning of this year.