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.

Enjoy!

I did have a plan though. I booted up my Windows 7 emergency System Repair Disc, and attempted to go back to a previous System Restore Point. Every time I tried though, I received a failure error of 0×80070057. (*Spoiler Alert* After I restored my computer, I realized I had turned off Systems Restore for all my drives. Sheesh, not sure why I did that. Probably to save disk space. Lesson learned.)

That left me with one option to get Windows back up and running without too much pain. In the menu of the System Repair Disk, I selected System Image Recovery, since I had scheduled weekly full backups of my system. (You do too, right?)

After successfully running the system image restoration process, a few of my files were now a week or so out of date. When I logged in, up popped my Carbonite client. It had recognized that my system had just gone through a recovery, and gave me options on restoring my files that were either out of date or missing. I selected the files to restore, and now my system is back up and running! Sweet!

The change I will be making to my backup strategy is enabling System Restore Points on my C: drive.

Summary:

• Create a Windows System Repair Disc
• Enable System Restore Points on the System drive (C:)
• Schedule weekly System Image backups
• Purchase a Carbonite subscription, and use the recommended backup settings
• Be a little skeptical of emergency patches