Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: sanfairyanne on September 14, 2013, 01:59:27 pm
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I don't even know what it's called, I attach a screen grab. I have a ''folder'' called America 2013 which has dozens of other subfolders within, I want to add another folder separate from the America 2013. So the new one would be directly below. How do I go about it ?
Many thanks in advance.
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Hi,
do a control + click ( right mouseclick on windows ) on the folder America and choose 'show parent folder' from the list. Then you will see the root-folder of America and you will be able to create a new folder next to it, so it is at the same level as America.
I hope this will help you.
Robert
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Robert,
I am on a mac so I did a control click and it brought up this box, please forgive me as it doesn't say precisely 'show parent folder' I was a bit scared to play around.
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I think in your case 'add parent folder' is the right item to click on.
Robert
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I tried this, it's probably right but below are two screen grabs the first is the current state, the second one shows what happens after I Add a Parent Folder. It's appearing to just duplicate the original folder.
Sorry I just worry I will cobble my filing up if I play around.
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That's exactly what I thought you wanted : You see the parnt foldr of America in Lightroom and now you can create a new folder within pictures, which is in fact at the same level as America.
Or did I get you compeltly wrong ?
Now you can ctrl-click on pictures and create a new folder, and this folder is outside of America, but wihtin pictures.
Robert
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I got tempted to try a few things myself before I got your last message. I tried New Catalogue and named it Patagonia. It opened (although somehow it's called 2012). But now I can't see the America 2013. I know I haven't lost it but it sure would be nice to know what I'm doing. I understood you could have multiple catalogues.
I have Lightroom books but not with me.
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Maybe you need to slow down and get to those books, or go through videos produced by Adobe's Julieanne Kost, LL , or George Jardine, to mention the three best series. Concentrate on what they say about catalogues and organization and try not to be distracted by stuff about Develop and Print.
Make sure you know where your catalogue files are and how many you have. By default they are usually in Pictures/Lightroom. They are crucial as all your Lightroom work will be in a catalogue file, and you need to be confident you know what they are. One shortcut is when you are in a catalogue - Edit > Catalog Settings > General > Show. Try it - it takes you into Explorer.
You can have multiple catalogues, but I'd strongly advise you not to do so. They are effectively breaking up control of your pictures and your workflow and as you've seen, you can't see or search in other catalogues. One catalogue can contains hundreds of thousands of pictures and performance isn't affected (the only effect is on time backing it up). Stick to one catalogue until you're confident you know what you're doing - and even then think hard before using more than one.
I'd also recommend not using your folders to categorise your work into countries or themes. Stick to one of Lightroom's default-date based folder structures, and use keywords to categorise your pictures with terms like America, Patagonia, Cowboys etc.
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I'm going to have to go back to this wifi so slow Julianne Kost is speaking 3 words a minute !
I ditched the new catalogue and restored the old one.
Thanks for you help, I think JK's info' should help me.
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Thanks for posting this. This is a new one to me after recently switching to Lightroom in the past month from working in CS3 for the last 4 years.
The level of complexity over something as simple as navigating a basic folder hierarchal system within LR's interface outlined here is the reason I keep going back to just working in CS3 and saying to hell with it.
I still can't figure out what the heck you just did and the nomenclature of that dropdown menu which is no where close to being intuitive or user friendly. "Parent folder?" what OS or user interface design has even used those terms within a hierarchal folder structure and why and how would a photographer know what it meant?
I'ld love to get some answers from the authors of LR why they had to make folder navigation so complicated. I'm still confused and having a hard time keeping straight in my head the differences between the terminologies "Catalog" and "Library".
Thanks for giving me a catalyst to vent! It feels so good!
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Most photographers aren't so stupid they can't guess what a parent folder may be.
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After cooling off and rereading what you're trying to accomplish I might have an easier solution.
Understanding how complicated LR deals with the OS folder structure, I go directly to the folder in question within Mac OS interface and make my changes there and then go back into LR and select the folder that contains the change and choose "Synchronize Folder" in the same drop down menu you posted.
I think that's far easier than rereading the suggestions in this entire thread which took me several rereads to figure what "Parent Folder" does which I'm still not sure about at the moment.
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Most photographers aren't so stupid they can't guess what a parent folder may be.
Most smart photographers aren't stupid enough to assume they can speak for all photographers.
This is my backup plan until I figure out just what the heck LR is doing between Catalog and Library and my stored CS3 edits to 3000 Raws and about 500 jpegs...
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Tim,
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, so it's not just me. I finally got through a tutorial with Julianne Kost and am still none the wiser. She starts off with a wonderful looking image of her filing system showing two folders, one for Australia and one for Singapore.
This is what I want, I just want for instance a folder for Europe which when you click on that folder it opens to show France, Spain etc.
But below Europe I want a folder that says America, when you click on that it's broken up into folders saying California, Washington etc.
When I go to shoot in Hawaii all I want to be able to do is click on America > new folder.
I may just ditch Lightroom and go back to Bridge it's annoying the hell out of me.
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Just like Tim after calming down and re-reading everything I feel I may have worked things out. I guess a Parent Folder is the Pictures folder, the one that has the ''children'' or further sub folders. If I right click on the Pictures folder I can select an image that I want in my new sub folder.
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Most smart photographers aren't stupid enough to assume they can speak for all photographers.
Which is why I wrote "most". Clearly "parent folder" is beyond the wits of a few, but you obviously worked it out.
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Yes but it's still not working for me. I have created a new folder below America 2013 called test, yet when I try to import into Test from the desktop L5 just dumps the files into America 2013. I honestly despair with this, I know I'm just one check box short of getting it right but it's so damned frustrating.
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In the Import dialog, look at the top where it says Copy / Move / Add. If you're importing from the hard drive, only Add will be available. Add means register them in the catalogue where they are. So if they are in America in Lightroom, that's because they are in the America folder in Explorer.
From what you say, the other possibility is that Library > Show Photos in Subfolder is ticked. What this does is when you select America in the Folders panel, the grid/filmstrip shows photos in America and in its subfolders. Untick it and you get a view more like Explorer.
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Well just like a dumb fool I'm confused still but I have got this far. See image :
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You know that you can click those little triangles to open up the subfolders? You can also hold down Alt while clicking, and all levels of the hierarchy will open/close.
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I finally got through a tutorial with Julianne Kost and am still none the wiser. She starts off with a wonderful looking image of her filing system showing two folders, one for Australia and one for Singapore.
Do a search in this LR5 Manual pdf... (if you're on LR4 just search online for that manual)
http://helpx.adobe.com/pdf/lightroom_reference.pdf
entering the word "parent". It's easier to do this using Safari's "Find". Doing it in the downloaded pdf in Preview can be cumbersome.
You might try entering search words used in questions you ask yourself on how to do what you're doing. That's how I've had to teach myself how to use numerous Adobe imaging software with their pdf's and printed manuals. Tutorials are hit and miss the more specific and unique the situation.
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do a control + click ( right mouseclick on windows )
man, mac's have had right click for a very long time - long before apple started including multi button mice with the Mac (2005). Most heavy duty mac users tossed the 1 button apple mouses long before Apple offered a multi button mouse. I think Contextual menus supported right button early in OS X (it was part of the NextStep) and I think it may have even started before OS x on the mac . I'm curious why the need to continue to differentiate.
right click works fine for all users now a days.
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Part of your challenge may be that Lightroom is working WITH your operating system folder structure, so basically Lightroom is showing you a subset of the folders you have on your hard drive - those that you have associated with LR. Now, despite what else it is, LR is essentially a database program, and a database is 'an organized system of information'. If you have an address book with people's names, addresses and phone numbers in it on your desk or in your pocket, that's a database. So is a phone book. The term 'folder' goes back to the days of filing cabinets, where we had cabinets and each cabinet had drawers and each drawer had folders, and each file folder had various pieces of paper. You would think of the folder as being within the drawer and the drawer as being within the cabinet, so if you were to write those out with some sort of hierarchy it might look like this:
Cabinet 1
Drawer 1
Folder 1
Folder 2
Folder 3, etc.
Drawer 2
Folder 1
Folder 2
Folder 3, etc.
Cabinet 2
Drawer 1
Folder 1
Folder 2
Folder 3, etc.
Drawer 2
Folder 1
Folder 2
Folder 3, etc.
and so on.
So, we can replace 'cabinet' with 'drive', and no, we won't bother with why it's called the 'C' drive, and so on, but even though there's no physical arrangement the layout is basically the same. You could consider 'Drawer' to be the 'parent' or higher level of organization than a folder as it contains several folders, and you could consider Cabinet to be the 'parent' or higher level of organization than a drawer. Now hard drives are physical things as well as virtual, and so it is possible to subdivide a single physical drive into multiple virtual drives or 'drawers', but that gets too complicated so we'll simplify it by saying that we have 'cabinets' or 'drives' and we have 'folders'. Rather than having four levels of organization: cabinet->drawer->folder->files we can have virtually any number of levels - folders within folders within folders and each folder can hold files, other folders, or both.
If a folder is within a folder, it's considered a subfolder. If a folder contains other folders, it's considered (in Lightroom terms) a 'parent' folder. Parent folders can also be subfolders just as we have children, parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. Not so complicated.
In essence, then, rather than having cabinet->drawer->folder->files we have something like
Drive
Folder 1
Folder 2
Folder A
Folder *
File 1
File 2
Folder B
File 1
File 2
File 1
File 2
and so on. If you think of the drive as being the trunk of a tree, then each level of folder is like the branches of that tree and the files are the leaves. This is why it's sometimes called a directory tree.
So, that's essentially how your computer's hard drive is mapped out. Physically it doesn't look like that at all, but this is a convention that puts things in terms that we can make use of. Now, some folders can also have what are essentially 'shortcut' descriptions, so a path like
C: drive
Users Folder
Mike Folder
Desktop Folder
Pictures Folder
or C:\Users\Mike\Desktop\Pictures is just known as the Pictures folder.
In Lightroom, what you're seeing is the same sort of layout, but as I mentioned, it's only showing you a subset of what's on your drive because LR doesn't care about Word documents, PDF files, emails, or programs. All it cares about are image files.
When you 'import' an image, a group of images or a folder into Lightroom, all you're really doing is creating a dynamic link to that portion of the hard drive. You're telling LR to pay attention/be aware of those folders/files and to ignore everything else - non-related files/folders are of no interest to LR. But you're not actually creating anything within the LR database (catalogue file) itself, you're just highlighting a portion of what's already there. If you create a new folder from within LR you're creating a new folder in your hard drive structure, just using LR to do it for you. The effect is the same as going to Windows Explorer or Mac Finder or whatever and saying 'add new folder' and calling it whatever name you give it. When you import images into LR from an SD card or whatever, you're copying the images from the card onto your hard drive and putting them into whatever folder while SIMULTANEOUSLY creating links to those new files within the LR database. LR creates a line in it's database that says, "IMG0001.DNG is located at C:\Users\Mike\Desktop\Pictures\Mike's Images" or whatever. It's because of these 'pointers' that it's very important to always do your file management from within LR after importing images. If you move an image after importing it into LR then the link gets broken and LR says C:\Users\Mike\Desktop\Pictures\Mike's Images\IMG0001.DNG is no longer where it's supposed to be. If you have images on an external drive, say at E:\Users\Mike\Desktop\Pictures\Mike's Images\IMG0001.DNG and you disconnect the drive, LR says, "But I don't see an E: drive." When you reconnect the drive LR goes, "Oh, there it is!" and it's all happy again.
As pointed out already, every nested level of drives/folders in LR's Library module has an arrow beside it. If the arrow is pointing to the right > then the subfolders/files are hidden from view to keep things a little more organized. You can expand or collapse/contract each level of the directory tree by pressing on the arrow, and you can expand or collapse the entire nest of subfolders in any specific branch by holding down the Alt/Opt key and pressing on an arrow.
Now, because LR is working with a subset of your operating system's file structure, what you can do within LR is somewhat less than than what you can do within the operating system itself. By right-clicking or Cmd-clicking on a folder you can rename an existing folder, you can create a new subfolder by selecting "create folder inside...", you can display a parent folder not currently displayed by selecting "add parent folder" and you can remove a folder from its association with the LR catalogue. You can also move a folder from one location or drive to another by clicking on it and dragging it to a new location. Doing this within LR maintains the dynamic links. You cannot delete a folder from the drive using LR and if you delete an image or images from LR then it will first ask you if you want to remove them from the catalogue or delete them from the drive. Deleting them removes them as well, of course.
I trust that makes some kind of sense!
Mike.
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man, mac's have had right click for a very long time - long before apple started including multi button mice with the Mac (2005). Most heavy duty mac users tossed the 1 button apple mouses long before Apple offered a multi button mouse. I think Contextual menus supported right button early in OS X (it was part of the NextStep) and I think it may have even started before OS x on the mac . I'm curious why the need to continue to differentiate.
right click works fine for all users now a days.
Wayne: I did a LR workshop yesterday for about twenty people and there were three people there with Macs and one-button mice. No question that Macs CAN work with three button/scroll wheel mice, but many people still choose not to do so.
Mike.
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I figured it out! Yippee!
I loaded an SD card in my Mac Mini and selected in the destination side of the import module drop down menu "Organize" and chose...INTO ONE FOLDER
Which collapses the "2013" subfolders into showing only the newly named folder created by clicking on "Pictures" folder and selecting "Create Folder Inside "Pictures" folder".
Here's the LR4 screengrabs...
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Wayne: I did a LR workshop yesterday for about twenty people and there were three people there with Macs and one-button mice. No question that Macs CAN work with three button/scroll wheel mice, but many people still choose not to do so.
Mike.
Odd.
I teach a couple of LR and PS classes each month. I haven't seen anyone bring a one button mouse forever. Apple hasn't made one since around 2005, hard to believe anyone has one that old. Now granted, apple never has made a "two" button mouse, even today they are really sort of buttonless, but right click functionality has been around for over a decade, is extremely pervasive throughout the OS and all Mac apps. and supported by Apple mice since 2005. LR and PS won't run on any mac that shipped with a one button mouse.
Anyone using a one button mouse should certainly understand what "right" click means and how to get that functionality. Almost every program will offer something they user will need through a contextual menu so they run into it pretty quick, those that migrate from PC's certainly figure it out.
I never say control click anymore, and haven't had anyone ask me how do they "right" click ... well, I don't remember the last time.I guess I see this come up all the time and it seems it's getting pretty outdated, so it bugs me a little. I guess I have no problem embarrassing someone a little bit because they don't think they can "right" click on a mac.
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Maybe they were newer 'buttonless' mice then. The machines were all newer MacBooks. It's been a lot of years since I've used a Mac, so I bow to your greater knowledge!
Mike.