LR Reorganizing Photos........

[TallFlyer]

So over the last little while that I've used lightroom I hate to say that my file importing has been a little haphazard. I have a combination of individually dated folders as well as some folders that are YYYY>MM>DD. I would like to migrate to a directory structure that is all YYYY>MM>DD but there seems to be no way to do this short of reimporting all the images into a new Catalog and loosing all keywords, edits, ratings, etc and obviously this is not acceptable.

I even tried creating a new catalog and trying to import everything from the old catalog but the import dialog won't let me specify a new directory structure; it just wants to reimport all the files using the existing structure.

Any suggestions?

[john beardsworth]

Select all the images. Do a Ctrl S (Mac Cmd S) to save the metadata back to the files. Now import the pictures into a new catalogue. You will lose collections and flags, but won't lose keywords, ratings, edits etc.

[TallFlyer]

Select all the images. Do a Ctrl S (Mac Cmd S) to save the metadata back to the files. Now import the pictures into a new catalogue. You will lose collections and flags, but won't lose keywords, ratings, edits etc.

John, thanks for the help that did the trick.

After the Cmd-S I actually ended up just deleting folders from my existing LR catalog and reimporting them, moving it all to a new root folder. I have a lot of Smart Collections and that seemed the best way to keep those around. As for collections I just created keywords for each so I could retrieve those as well. It's really nice to now have 7 years of images a lot more organized!