Can you LR from an external hard drive

Hey guys - I would like to know if you can run LR from an external hard drive. Can you put the program on the external drive and then run everything from there? My laptop does not have the space to have the program on it. Would it run this way?

I would love to be able to use my LR on my laptop when on trips.

I know this is probably a "stupid" question, but this is not my area of expertise. Need some help. Any suggestions arel welome.

I am going on the Digital Madness workhop to the Caymans in a couple of weeks and need to have my laptop for the evening reviews. I usually do not travel with it since I do not have LR on it.

Thanks for the help - Pam

As you are talking of a Laptop and not mac i guess that you have a Windows Laptop.

I use Lightroom on my Laptop, but never tried to install it on a external disk, but knowing Windows in deep.

I guess that Lightroom should install on a extrenal disk (like most other Programs) but you have to set the

installation directory to the external disk during installation.

This is usually possible there where you choose the type of installation during set-up.

Try it out!

Chris

P.S. Why don't you buy a bigger internal hard disk and find somebody who help you with moving your system on it?

Previous thread here mentioned you cannot run lightroom from a USB connected drive. You might do a search for that thread as there was considerable info regarding your question. That thread was several months ago.

Okay - thanks for the info.

Pam

My laptop does not have the space to have the program on it.

Not sure how large the install is on a Windows machine, but on the Mac it is under 100 MB and if you are that tight for space on your machine you should try to clear up space and/or replace the drive. You can set catalogs and cache to external discs if needed (I am assuming it is the same as Mac in that respect. I have not installed LR on my PCs, I can check though if you want.)

Odd. I have absolutely no problem with doing that.

This is what I do and it work just fine:

On my main server I have all "master" image files on a drive mapped to a specific letter (F).

On same main server keep the LR library (not the images tho) in a dropbox folder.

On my other computers (Laptop, other workstations) I have mapped a specific directory to same letter F. This is where I keep whatever image files I am interested in working on, usually the last 500 GB of files or less (depending on what computer it happens to be). I also have the corresponding dropbox on those computers.

Then I have a workstation where I occasionally work but never save any images to, but I sometimes bring a USB drive with images to it. This station has the dropbox folder, and as long as I map the USB drive to this same letter F, I can work with the LR catalog just fine.

The only things to be mindful of is:

Don't have LR running simultaneously on two machines.

"Last changed" catalog "wins" in the dropbox scenario.

Granted, working on the USB will be slower, and if you keep previews in dropbox, the sync before working or it will be slow.

Not sure how large the install is on a Windows machine, but on the Mac it is under 100 MB and if you are that tight for space on your machine you should try to clear up space and/or replace the drive. You can set catalogs and cache to external discs if needed (I am assuming it is the same as Mac in that respect. I have not installed LR on my PCs, I can check though if you want.)

Okay...not sure I understand then. I was under the impression that LR required 2gigs of RAM to run it and 1 gig of available hard drive space. The ability to install and then run it seem like to different things. Sorry for the confusion - but this is getting out of my arena and I need help.

On my main home PC I have LR on the main computer but all of the catalogs are on the external hard drive for space reasons - since photos eat up so much. I do not want to keep photos on the laptop - just want to be able to use it while away.

Thanks for the help guys - Pam

Do the same as on your home PC;

Lightroom on your laptop's hard disk and the pix and Lightroom Catalogue on a external drive.

You should be able to upgrade for a few 100$ your RAM to 2 or better 4 GB of memory and your laptop will act as a new one,

with or without Lightroom.

Depending on your laptop you might get a USB 3.0 or a Firewire disk, this will accelarate the loadingof the Catalogue a lot.

Chris