• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Dark mode now has a single preference for the whole site! It's a simple toggle switch in the bottom right-hand corner of any page. As it uses a cookie to store your preference, you may need to dismiss the cookie banner before you can see it. Any problems, please let us know!

Accidentally removed all folders in a catalog!

Status
Not open for further replies.

jessica wickham

New Member
Joined
Feb 19, 2017
Messages
3
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version
Hi -- I'm new to Lightroom and having a great time setting up my catalog. I imported photos from iPhoto and have set up a folder structure based on years. I've got about 18,000 images. Unfortunately, after getting all the folders organized, I accidentally REMOVED the main folder (I had called it "imported from iPhoto") that all the other folders were pointing to!! So my entire folder structure is no longer visible in the left side panel... The 18000 photos are still in the "All Photographs" area in the catalog. Thankfully the folders still exist on my hard drive. Is there any way to easily restore the folders back into LR? Or do I have to recreate them all from scratch?

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

Jessica
 
Hi, welcome to the forum.

Interesting....if you "remove" the parent folder then yes, all the other sub-folders are also removed. BUT, the images in those folders are also removed, i.e. they'll no longer appear in "All Photographs". So something doesn't sound quite right....in which case a screenshot of the left hand panel (with both the Catalog and Folders panels expanded and visible) would be the best place to start to try unravelling the mystery.
 
Sounds like maybe your folder panel is hidden. Right-click anywhere on an empty part in the header of another left side panel. That will bring up a contextual menu where you can hide/show individual panels.
 
Hello Jim & Johan,

Thanks so much for the quick responses! Great to know that this forum exists...

Well, late last night in frustration after apparently losing my folders, I exited and rebooted and went to bed... This morning I opened LR again and by some small miracle, the folders were BACK! So strange. I'm sure it was my error, but I can't figure out for the life of me what I did. I did try clicking on the side panel headers underneath Folders but they did not reveal the folders... Hmmm... Another thing -- there were a number of empty sub-folders that showed up this morning, a few underneath each Year subfolder. I thought I had deleted them all previously.

So, happy ending. I don't understand but I'm not going to ask more questions!!

:)
 

Attachments

  • LR.jpg
    LR.jpg
    139.2 KB · Views: 455
I think I figured out what happened... earlier I had chosen to "display parent folder" to my LightroomMasters folder. It showed the parent folder "Pictures" but that also contained the folder that I used for exported photos from iPhoto (that I proceeded to import into LR). This was the folder that I removed accidentally. How the folders were restored is still a mystery though!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top