moving images from one external hard drive to another

I believe the OP is talking about using the Organizer. This thread seems to be a follow-up to a previous thread of his.

Photoshop elements conversion and consolidations with NAS

Before using your SSD drive, I highly recommend doing a full backup from the organizer on a different external drive. It's not only a safety step before a very important reorganization, it's also a possible way to perform that reorganization.
Before considering the upgrade to PSE2020 concentrate on the task of moving your media files from the old drive (or several old drives) to the SSD. I insist on the word moving, not copying. If you move your media files from the organizer, the catalog does know the new location. If you copy them from the organizer or from the explorer/finder, the new location would be ignored. So, first move the files from the organizer to the new external file (SSD or conventional, no difference). Have a look at your previous post.
The simplest way is to move the files (all the files or only folders by folders) by drag and drop from the left folder panel (see previous discussion).
Your present catalog could manage files scattered in several different drives. In such a case, instead of moving files from each different drive to the target SSD drive, the good solution would be to use the full backup created for safety in the first step to restore everything on the destination SSD drive. The restored library will replace each drive with a new master folder in the SSD drive. Everything will be consolidated. And another important result of the restore would be that the catalog folder itself would be restored on the new SSD drive. The SSD drive will be an important factor of speed for a catalog folder.

Now, about upgrading from PSE2019 to PSE2020: Both above solutions will work before installing PSE2020. You can test the result from PSE2019. If you have installed PSE2020 before the library move, it will have its own (empty) catalog ready after the installation. Then, you'll have to use it to convert the catalog created in PSE2019 format by the 'restore' process made frop PSE2019. The PSE2019 catalog will continue to work with PSE2019. The converted catalog will work with PSE2020.
Alternatively, instead of using PSE2019 to restore the backup, you can use PSE2020. In that case, you'll be prompted automatically to convert the catalog to the new version.

A significant difference between using the drag and drop move option or the backup/restore one is that the backup/restore has the result of storing the catalog folder on the destination drive instead of the default location in your system drive. It's your choice, you can move the catalog folder to and from the default/destination location from the explorer. I would recommend storing it in the SSD for better performance.

yurkot, seems you are confused as am I. But consider this. You did two backups correct. Then you want to return photos from one backup to organizer, am I seeing it right? First, does the backup actually remove the images from the catalog? If not all are still where you left them. Second, organizer would recognize the first backup correct, so return images using that ex hd and keep the one organizer does not recognize as you security back up. Does this sound good? TB

TB,
We do not have feedback from yurkot.
I take it that yurkot has been satisfied with my answer and if not, I am ready to help if necessary.
Let's examine some points in how you are seeing the problem.


This is not relevant to the issue, which is not to simply move folders from one disk to another, which is very basic with Windows Explorer. It's to keep all the organization stored in the catalog.

helpx.adobe.com/elements-organizer/using/creating-editing-catalogs.html
As you can see, there is a tremendous amount of useful information to manage catalogs, add tags, captions, notes, ratings, grouping files into albums, version sets, stacks, creating a lot of indexes for immediate retrieval of files with multicriteria searches. Neither Elements Organizer nor catalogs do contain any file, only links to their real location which may be on any kind of internal or external drives. The organizer is your tool to manage your media library, which means much more than moving files from the Explorer. The organizer manages the tasks done usually by the Explorer: moving, deleting, renaming and does what the Explorer can't do, grouping, finding, displaying, creating albums, slideshows, managing face recognition or geotagging ets.
So the problem is to have all or part of the media library moved from the original (small) drive to an external drive while keeping all the organization. That simply means doing the physical move from drive to drive and to update the links in the catalog to the new destination of the file.
This is a simple job for the organizer if you understand that you should never move, delete or rename files from outside the organizer (from the Explorer, which is a catastrophe).

Side note about the 'Pictures' library. In my experience, it's the worst choice to store your photo library and manage it with your organizer. You are much better by creating your own, custom master folder.


There does not seem to be any confusion here, yurkot did the wrong choice by moving files outside of the organizer (as mentionned by Pontiac) instead of using the organizer to move the files to the external drive.

Two confusing circumstances here require more explanations.
- The new computer is supposed to be upgraded from version 2019 to 2020.
- there is a choice for the user to store the catalog folder (the database and its associated tools) eiter on the internal drive or in the external drive.
That's what my answer was dealing with.