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Bulk Rename and Update Catalog (Mac)

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realspear

Member
Joined
Mar 12, 2012
Messages
76
Location
Lisbon, Portugal
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic 10.1.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.14 Mojave
I have about 6TB of photos in my catalog across a number of years. I lived in the US for a long time and used a folder structure by date yyyy/mm/dd. These are inside folders by year. I have moved to a country in which a folder structure of yyyy/dd/mm fits better. I find it confusing at this point, as does another person who uses my photos, since nothing here has the month preceding the date.

What I would like to do is rename every folder with photos to yyyy/dd/mm but not have to do a lot of updating in LR. I'm wondering if there's any easy way to do this.
 
Why would a certain folder structure fit one country better than another? I know that the date is written as MM-DD-YYYY in the USA and DD-MM-YYYY in Europe, but who cares? Changing your folder structure would be quite a task, so if it really matters to you, then consider making a smart collection structure according to what you think would be appropriate for Portugal.
 
Why would a certain folder structure fit one country better than another? I know that the date is written as MM-DD-YYYY in the USA and DD-MM-YYYY in Europe, but who cares? Changing your folder structure would be quite a task, so if it really matters to you, then consider making a smart collection structure according to what you think would be appropriate for Portugal.
Because it's confusing. 07/09 and 09/07 can mean the same thing depending on where you are. But everything I do other than file structure is in one format. Your answer doesn't particularly help with question I asked.
 
Because it's confusing. 07/09 and 09/07 can mean the same thing depending on where you are. But everything I do other than file structure is in one format. Your answer doesn't particularly help with question I asked.
No need for hostility. I just tried to make you realise that Lightroom can work in different ways. Rather than using the folder structure as anything other than just a storage place, you can use a collection structure for organising your images. That is in fact how Lightroom was designed.
 
I use collections. I also get a lot of requests for retrieval by date.
So? The EXIF data of your images contain the date. It is easy to create a smart collection or a filter based on the date of the image. I am not saying that you should not store images in dated folders, I am saying that that you do not need these folders to find/organise images. My folder panel is closed 99% of the time.
 
So? The EXIF data of your images contain the date. It is easy to create a smart collection or a filter based on the date of the image. I am not saying that you should not store images in dated folders, I am saying that that you do not need these folders to find/organise images. My folder panel is closed 99% of the time.
And what I'm saying is that is how I do store my images. You really want to now answer my question so maybe it would be better not to respond.
 
And what I'm saying is that is how I do store my images. You really want to now answer my question so maybe it would be better not to respond.

Lightroom could care less about a filesystem folder structure. I don’t really see an issue with you or your new country colleagues.

Unless you allow your colleagues access to your computer and your Lightroom catalog, you should not even be exposing your computer catalog filesystem structure to any one but yourself.

I would not recommend moving image to a different folder structure. You can always create a date sorted Smart Collection/Collection set.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Why would a certain folder structure fit one country better than another? I know that the date is written as MM-DD-YYYY in the USA and DD-MM-YYYY in Europe, but who cares? Changing your folder structure would be quite a task, so if it really matters to you, then consider making a smart collection structure according to what you think would be appropriate for Portugal.
Actually MM-DD-YYYY is one option in the US. The more logical DD-MM-YYYY is just as common . File dates are universal time stamps and only the display order is controlled by the OS settings. Folders aren’t really using dates but names expressed as numbers.
 
Actually MM-DD-YYYY is one option in the US. The more logical DD-MM-YYYY is just as common . File dates are universal time stamps and only the display order is controlled by the OS settings. Folders aren’t really using dates but names expressed as numbers.
I give them a drive.
 
Of course all of this discussion is related to the philsophical question of date order where as I understand the original quesiton was not "should" I change the date format of folders but "how" to change the date format of the folders.

So, getting back to that question, as far as I know there is no good answer. There are a few options but none are without negative attributes. Here are a couple....

1) Within LR, with good music on the player and plenty of time with nothing better to do, one by one rename the folders in the Folders Panel.
PRO: nothing is lost in LR
CON: time consuming and tedious

2) Save metadata to disk. Remove images from LR and re-import them using the most desired date format option provided by LR.
PRO: Not too time cosuming or tedius. LR does most the work
CON: you will loose all your edit history, your pick/reject flags and all image participation of images in collections
 
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