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The question marks on all the folders and exclamation points on thumbnails on that drive will go away.
#How to change where files are stored on lightroom free#
As soon as you reconnect that drive to your computer, you will see the volume browser come to life and the indicator change color to reflect the amount of free space on that drive. If you use one or more external drives, then you may see this quite often if/when you operate Lightroom Classic without those drives being connected (as in the capture above). In some cases an entire drive can be offline, in which case the volume browser for that drive will appear dimmed. Lightroom Classic lets you know when it can no longer connect/refer to the source photos by displaying a question mark icon on the affected folders and an exclamation point icon on all affected photos (you may also notice a “Photo is missing” message displayed under the Histogram). What happens outside of the catalog stays outside of the catalog. The place where people run into trouble is when they move, rename, or delete photos (or containing folders) outside of Lightroom Classic, which results in the location stored in the catalog no longer being valid. As long as you use Lightroom to do all file maintenance tasks (such as move, rename, or delete imported photos and folders) then that information is updated inside the catalog as part of the maintenance process.
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The path to that location is stored inside the catalog along with all the metadata embedded in each imported photo, and that is what Lightroom uses to find the source photos as you do your work. An often overlooked aspect of the import process into Lightroom Classic is that the exact location of where to find those photos on your system is written into the catalog file at that time.