Managing Folders

[feppe]

I just bought the LL LR tutorials and was happy to hear that managing folders within LR should be a breeze. But I just found out it isn't. I was planning to move all my daily folders which were in a long flat folder to a new folder structure (year - month - day). Can't do this easily in LR, as I have to drag and drop each and every folder - although I can select more than one folder, only one of them gets dragged and dropped. The other option - manage folders outside LR and locate folder afterwards in LR - is even more time-consuming, as I have to re-locate each and every folder.

Any way to manage folders in LR without having to pull my hair out?

[James R]

Let first say that I'm not an expert LR user.  However, I did find myself in a similar situation to you.  To get a handle on my many thousands of captures,  I used Windows Explorer and PhotoMechic to create the file structure, purge unwanted captures, and, finally, copy the remaining into the new file structure.  Then I imported all the captures into LR.  It was a pain only because my workflow got sloppy the past few years.   Now my workflow is better structured and the files make sense.  The price was about 8 hours of work, but well worth it in the end.

[michael]

Why move the folders? Leave them where they are and simply have LR reference them in place.

You can then impose whatever structure (or lack of it) that you want on a virtual basis. What I do is to organize images using Collections. This way you also can have multiple copies of the file in different catagories without using any additional disk space.

This is a new approach to file organization. Try not to impose old ways of working and thinking.

Michael

[Kuryan Thomas]

Why move the folders? Leave them where they are and simply have LR reference them in place.
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I can't speak for the OP, but I can see that there are reasons. For example, it might be part of a filesystem backup strategy, or perhaps an offline archival strategy.

[feppe]

Why move the folders? Leave them where they are and simply have LR reference them in place.

You can then impose whatever structure (or lack of it) that you want on a virtual basis. What I do is to organize images using Collections. This way you also can have multiple copies of the file in different catagories without using any additional disk space.

This is a new approach to file organization. Try not to impose old ways of working and thinking.

Michael
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Well, that's what I'm forced to do, as I don't have the time to re-organize the folders the way LR is forcing me to do, as it's too time-consuming. And I can't just re-import all the files, as they have metadata, keywords etc. attached to them which would mean re-doing a lot of work.

But I'd like to have a clean folder structure as well. My current system is quite chaotic, to say the least. Finding that certain photo without LR is a major undertaking. Further, if LR loses a photo, finding it becomes a needle-chase in a haystack.

There are other reasons, but the main point is that managing folders should be more manageable, as currently it's literally 10 years behind any rudimentary file manager. (I know LR isn't a file manager, but having the basic functionality of moving a bunch of folders at the same time should be a no-brainer.)

[Sid EOS]

The key thing that Michael said was "
This is a new approach to file organization. Try not to impose old ways of working and thinking."

I rarely look at the folder structure, to be honest I really don't want to know where  Lightroom™ does all the organizational grunt work, my structure is virtual, and therefore much more flexible and adaptable. No multiple copies of images for me, Virtual copies and collections are a much better approach for my way of working.

[djgarcia]

One of the things I do as part of my back-up process is to copy the LR / ACR databases, which are in the system drive and AFAIK can't be relocated, to my data volume before the image back-up runs. You don't want to have the databases and images to be out of sync if you have to restore. My back-up utility runs the copy script automatically. Of course you need to copy them back manually if you do restore. I just hope I remember .

[john beardsworth]

The key thing that Michael said was "
This is a new approach to file organization. Try not to impose old ways of working and thinking."

I rarely look at the folder structure, to be honest I really don't want to know where  Lightroom does all the organizational grunt work, my structure is virtual, and therefore much more flexible and adaptable. No multiple copies of images for me, Virtual copies and collections are a much better approach for my way of working.
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And that works fine so long as you trust forever in the management tool and never look at your images outside it. Yes, you could just put everything into one big folder, or leave chaos as it is. But when things go belly up, as they always do one day, or when you decide to migrate to another management tool, which will happen - that's when a traditional, logical folder structure remains the best way to keep yourself organized and recover / rebuild. This "new approach" is little more than marketing hype / intoxication with a new toy. In the OP's case, a crash would mean figuring out how to resurrect his current chaotic structures, so he's absolutely right to seek to bring order to his collection. LR is a v1.0. let's not forget.

Feppe, what took a long time to get chaotic is inevitably going to take time to sort out the way you want. One way to reduce the work is to move groups of folders in Explorer, and then use LR's right click on Folders - its Locate Missing Folder allows you to correct the location of a parent folder, and its children too. Also look at Metadata > XMP > Export XMP - if you need to recatalogue, all the metadata will be with your images. Go slowly at first, and have proper backups.

John

[feppe]

Yep, that's one thing I'm mostly worried about: when I want to migrate out, when I'm moving my photos to another computer/system, and/or when I need to restore backups. Something is bound to go wrong, and relying on a database which refers to a chaotic directory structure is asking for trouble.

Feppe, what took a long time to get chaotic is inevitably going to take time to sort out the way you want. One way to reduce the work is to move groups of folders in Explorer, and then use LR's right click on Folders - its Locate Missing Folder allows you to correct the location of a parent folder, and its children too. Also look at Metadata > XMP > Export XMP - if you need to recatalogue, all the metadata will be with your images. Go slowly at first, and have proper backups.

John
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That's what I thought, too. But I couldn't get the subdirs to be located automatically. Sometimes it appears to work, sometimes not - even with the same exact steps. It's quite finicky.

[Tim Gray]

Well, I still use Breeze DL Pro to download the shots - the re-naming convention is yymmdd_file#from the orig file name_xxx(description of the day's shoot)  I suppose I'll figure out the LR equivalent eventually, but I expect that when I want to find a file outside of LR, I'll look for it based on the file name.

edit:  Also the metadata is not proprietary to LR - if properly keyworded you could easily find the file with other tools.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Well, I still use Breeze DL Pro to download the shots - the re-naming convention is yymmdd_file#from the orig file name_xxx(description of the day's shoot)  I suppose I'll figure out the LR equivalent eventually, but I expect that when I want to find a file outside of LR, I'll look for it based on the file name.

edit:  Also the metadata is not proprietary to LR - if properly keyworded you could easily find the file with other tools.
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I use DL Pro also, and it is so simple, versatile, and effective that I am very reluctant to let LR try to reorganize things for me.