I am looking at my Hard Drive Folders through Lightroom/Library module. There are the Folder and subfolders that I have NOT been working out of for the last five years.
D:
/Quick Pile for Lightroom
/2008 Indy Air show, Bonneville work box, apples, oranges...
Below that, are my Collections:
Collections:
/Quick pile for Lightroom/
/2008 Indy Air Show, Bonneville work box, apples, oranges...
Is that enough explanation as to what I have done?
My "Collections" almost mirrors my D drive.
In my mindset five years ago I thought I had to import every single file to a Collection. I have done so meticulously for 8000 photos. These photos are the cream of my crop.
My lower ranking ones do not make it to Lightroom and are backed up carefully on my E: and external hard drives.
Of course my .lrcat and .lrdata files are backed up on those drives as well.
SO... I have 8000 photos that have a little, or a lot of, changes to them. ALL done to virtual copies of the original (cr2, tiff, and jpg) files. All of these changes were done to the files in the Collection versions.
NOT the Folder versions.
In a discussion with a friend, who could not understand what the heck I was doing, I realized, this morning, I did not need to Import every photo and I can work off the Folder versions of all of my Photographs. Create Virtual and edit... Lightroom takes care of all my changes just like in the imported Collection version.
THE BIG QUESTION:----> Now... Is there a way I can move all of my virtual copies/changes to apply/relate to the Folder version of the Photographs vs the Collection version?
I know they are the exact photo in both references. but Lightroom will not allow me to move the virtual copies(from the Collection Set) to the Folder version. It will also tell me that if I try to move the original (from the Collection version) to the Folder version it tells me that there is already a copy of that file in the Folder.(kind of a "duh" moment but I tried it nonetheless.)
I think... sigh... that in the last five years of using Lightroom I have created a Frankenstein. Any way to clean up this mess?
Other notes: I do not copy/duplicate files into a Lightroom Folder within Lightroom, all the original files remain on that D: drive. This is Lightroom 5.7
Thank you for reading such a long winded post. Any help with solving this fandango will be greatly appreciated.
Rob't