Moving Windows Live Photo Gallery Managed Photos to Another Drive

jess — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:07:20 +0000

We recently purchased a better digital camera for our family’s use, which takes photos at a much higher resolution than our previous camera. I decided it was time to move all of our photos from the current hard drive they were on to a larger drive.

Below are the test steps I took to migrate the photos to a different drive, and have everything synced in Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011.

Test Setup

I created a Windows 7 virtual machine using VMware Player, and attached a virtual second hard drive as E:
I installed Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011
I created a "Photos" directory on the C: drive
I copied over some photos to use as samples, and tagged them with names and keywords

Remove the Original Library

Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG) uses the Pictures Library locations configured in Windows. I have my source photo directory located at C:\Photos. I needed to remove this from the Windows Pictures Library.

Open the Pictures folder

Click the "locations" link in the Pictures Library

Then remove the directory you want to move

If you open up WLPG at this point, you should no longer see any of the photos or videos that are in this directory.

Copy or Move the Original Directory

I then moved the directory from C:\Photos to E:\Photos.

Add the New Pictures Library

Now I added the new location as a Pictures Library location in Windows.

Open the Pictures folder

Click the "locations" link in the Pictures Library

Click Add, and browse to the new directory location

View in Windows Live Photo Gallery

Now, when I opened Windows Live Photo Gallery, I could see all of the photos, tags and all, but they are in the new location.