Moving Folders in Lightroom
As your image collection grows and you run out of storage space you will be sure to have a requirement to move all or part of your collection. I have just gone through the process of installing a 1 Tera-byte internal RAID5 array to cater for my growing collection. By the time I fill this the price of storage should be suitably affordable to allow another upgrade in capacity.
What I found the quickest and easiest way to move my collection was to use Windows Explorer and make a copy of my collection on the new RAID drive (best to make sure you have a copy while you get things working again). I then started up Lightroom 1.1, as it could no longer find my images all the folders turned red. With a right click on the folder it was as simple as selecting Locate Missing Folder and browsing to the new physical location.
Once Lightroom was happy with the new location the folder changed from red back to grey.
Lightroom then rescanned the images and I was up and running again. This process only took a couple of minutes to scan around 7000 images.
Windows users can also prompt Lightroom to allow you to change the folder location at any time by holding down the Ctrl key while right clicking on the folder. This will now show the Locate Missing Folder in the menu. I expect Mac users can do a similar thing.