This past weekend I shot a retirement party for a friend of my wife. On Sunday I reviewed the images and put about 50 of them in a new collection for further processing. I went through these, and when I was done, I exported all of the images in the collection as medium sized jpgs (for making small prints and screen images) and put them in a folder inside the master folder for all the images. (Not the collection folder.)
After doing this, I looked at the file structure in Windows and did not see the jpg folder. Not being entirely sure that I had done it right, I went back and exported the images again. This time the folder showed up in the file structure of Windows and Lr. Great!
However, when I went to Lr, in the master folder, not a subfolder, I had the original dngs, the jpgs and the worked on dngs. Crap! A messy file with everything thrown into one place. So, I deleted the jpgs and worked-on images using the sort classifications at the top right of the Library panel.
After doing this, I realized that the collection I had set up was empty. Furthermore, all of jpg files, including the ones in the sub folder, were gone. I was able to recover the jpgs as they were in the trash folder and I moved them back. As far as I know, the adjusted images are gone, which is unfortunate, but not catastrophic as I have the jpgs and can re-do the dngs if anything needs to be printed in large format.
I believe that what happened is that the collection ties its images back to the master file and puts a new virtual image there, which is linked to the collection. When I deleted the virtual images in the master folder, I also deleted the images in the collection. I also think that the jpgs I was seeing in the master folder, were actually the images from the subfolder, though I don’t think I have the feature to show images from sub folders turned on. (Have to check.) It is a bit mysterious.
Am I on the right track to understand this? What is a good reference for understanding this better? Clearly, my understanding is less than perfect.
