 Today I'm going to show you the second biggest mistake that new Lightroom users make. What's up nerds? My name is Adam. Welcome back to another photo nerds university tutorial. Today I'm going to show you the second biggest mistake that new Lightroom users make when they start getting into this program. I see this probably more than the first or the number one biggest mistake that new Lightroom users make. If you haven't seen that video, I'll link that up in the cards up above. But today I want to talk about the second biggest thing that new Lightroom users make. And it goes a little something like this. So you have now learned how to import your pictures into Lightroom. You get them in here. And then for some reason you decide that you want to organize some things. Maybe you're in a little bit of an organizational mood and you want to go ahead and move some things around. So what do you do? You go to your hard drive, whether it's your computer or your external drive. You find the folders that you want to reorganize. You start making folders and moving photos. And then when you get back here inside a Lightroom, you see this. Question marks or exclamation points asking you or telling you that your photos can no longer be found. And I don't know about you, but when I first started this drove me crazy. It's one of the reasons why I have no more hair because I used to pull it out just about right from here. All jokes aside, this used to drive me crazy though because I had no idea why this was happening. So here's why it's happening and here's how you should do it from now on. First, the reason that it's happening is because your photos don't live inside a Lightroom. They live on the external drive or the internal drive where these photos once were when you imported into your Lightroom catalog. And Lightroom is simply just a directory. All it knows is where they were when you started this problem. It doesn't know where you've moved them once you move them after the fact. So don't do that. If you want to move your photos, it's really easy. All you have to do is do it from inside a Lightroom. You can create a folder by right clicking, name it whatever you want, and then simply drag and drop the photos into that folder. And you'll see if you go to your external drive, you can do this by right clicking, say show and finder if you're a Mac user or show and explore if you're a PC user. This will take you directly to where your new photo folder has been created and where your photos live now. So even though you're doing it inside a Lightroom, it's also happening on the back end as well. So there's really no reason to go and do this outside of Lightroom once you've imported your photos into your catalog. Hopefully this makes some sense to you. If it doesn't, leave us a comment down in the description below. We'll try and do a better job of explaining it. But if you want to save yourself some headache, don't do this outside of Lightroom once you've imported your photos. Only do it from inside of Lightroom. I guarantee you it's going to save you a lot of headache in the long run. That's all I've got for you today. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great day everybody.