• 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.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.
  • 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!

Batch Create Folders

Status
Not open for further replies.

rickboden

New Member
Joined
Dec 23, 2015
Messages
13
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic version 8.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.14 Mojave
Hello,
I import the images into Lightroom by date so for example, I will have a 2018 folder with sub-folders such as 2018-12-10 containing DNG files. I want to organize these yearly folders by months which means creating sub folders such as 01-Jan, and 02-Feb, etc., and then dragging in the appropriate folders so I have only 12 folders under each year with each import nested in its monthly folder.

How can I make this a bit simpler than having to create 12 folders one at a time for each year? With more than 10 years of yearly folders this is a bigger job than I want it to be.

Thanks for any advice.

Rick
 
Lightroom can do that for you on import. Just change the settings in the import dialog.

Lightroom.jpg


If you want to do this to reorganise existing images, then you'll have to do it manually however.
 
Going forward- you should select an Import option that will automatically place imported files into 'Year' and 'Month' sub-folders.
eg.-
ScreenShot191.jpg

Choose one of these options in the Destination panel and highlight the parent folder (My Pictures, Images, etc) when you import. So you would get: My Pictures\2019\01\photos, etc

Going backward- Yes, you would need to re-arrange things in the folder panel- Create new 'Month' folders and drag&drop folders in the folder panel, or do a filter search by date, select photos in one month, and create a 'Month' folder to move the files.
ScreenShot192.jpg
ScreenShot194.jpg
ScreenShot193.jpg
 
It's a bit of a pain that LR doesn't allow you to automate mass moving of photos around... Admittedly mass anything can lead to mass chaos. A rename that worked a bit like an import might sometimes come in handy. I suppose you can't get away with "move" importing already imported photos. What would be the outcome? Losing your edits or just more mass chaos?
 
It's a bit of a pain that LR doesn't allow you to automate mass moving of photos around... Admittedly mass anything can lead to mass chaos. A rename that worked a bit like an import might sometimes come in handy. I suppose you can't get away with "move" importing already imported photos. What would be the outcome? Losing your edits or just more mass chaos?
You'd lose all your edits, and all virtual copies, and all memberships of collections. If the latter things don't bother you, then it's doable. First select all images and choose 'Metadata - Save Metadata to Files'. That will save your edits and added metadata like keywords to XMP files (or save it in the file header for DNG, JPEG, TIFF). Then you can remove the images from the Lightroom catalog and import them again using the 'Move' option. Because you saved metadata to files, the edits and the keywords will be restored during that import, but the other things (virtual copies, memberships of collections) do get lost.
 
Thanks ! Good to know. All I need to do now is find some empty space in my memory where I can keep that information for a rainy day.
 
I haven’t tried this, so it may fail completely, but I wonder if importing (Import > Move) the images with the ‘old’ folder structure as source, and a new structure specified in the import dialog would achieve this. I fear that this may fail to transfer develop settings and other metadata. Has anyone tried this approach?
 
I haven’t tried this, so it may fail completely, but I wonder if importing (Import > Move) the images with the ‘old’ folder structure as source, and a new structure specified in the import dialog would achieve this. I fear that this may fail to transfer develop settings and other metadata. Has anyone tried this approach?
Did you read my earlier message? If you save metadata to files first, like I described, then this will work and you will not lose develop settings and other metadata.
 
Apologies, Johan - I missed that. I can see that metadata will be preserved where it’s embedded in the image file (jpg, tiff, dng etc), but what about proprietary raw files (eg nef), where some of the metadata is placed in a sidecar xmp file? In other words, are the xmp files also imported?
 
Apologies, Johan - I missed that. I can see that metadata will be preserved where it’s embedded in the image file (jpg, tiff, dng etc), but what about proprietary raw files (eg nef), where some of the metadata is placed in a sidecar xmp file? In other words, are the xmp files also imported?
Yes they are. Do you really think I would give this advice if I didn't know what I'm talking about?
 
Flags is the other main one that doesn't get written to xmp, which a lot of people use. Stars do get saved, so you can filter for flags and assign them stars instead before writing.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top