How do i refolder all my old pics in LR 2.3?

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pirahnah3

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Ok i wached vids on importing images and i understand how to do that, but (see i warned yall i he tons of qestions lol) as i am taking some advice from the gurus here and i am going to reorgannize all my old images. Ok so relying purely on what might be available in the image data how can i take what i have done now and organize it so that i can at least change to a year folder the simplest. should it be done in LR or should i do it in explorer or somthign else? I basicly want to take all my curent images that i have and put them in the commonlly acceppted format of

Picture folder
yyyy
yyyy/ mm
yyy/mm/date
possible subfolders for muiple locations in one day

can someone or a few of yall help walk me thru this large process??
 
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Let me advise you not to do this.

Let me advise you to put your effort and time into organizing your photos with Lightroom keywords, captions, other metadata and collections. Let me advise you to leave your photos wherever they are right now.

Why? Because using Lightroom structures, you get a more powerful organizing method. You can do things in Lightroom that cannot easily be done in Windows (if it can be done at all in Windows). Furthermore, Windows folders were never designed for organizing photos, whereas Lightroom was designed for this.

Furthermore, I advise people who are using Lightroom to simply stop thinking in terms of Windows folders. Just stop! Use Lightroom to find your photos from now on. And if you do that, it simply does not matter at all what folders your photos are in (because you aren't looking in folders to find your photos). In my case, when the photos come out of the camera, they have to go somewhere, so I put them in folders by capture date under the top level folder "Nikon Photos". And after that ... I never think about folders. I can find that picture of that beautiful barn in a flash, and I have no idea what folder it is in.
 
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Assuming your old images have EXIF data and they haven't been imported yet, you can have Lightroom do it during the import process.

If they've already been imported, you will have to do it manually within LR. I've yet to find a way to have Lightroom reorganize images into folders based on the EXIF data after it has been imported. It's a feature that I personally would like to see, and have put in a request for.

If the older images have no EXIF data, you'll have to do it manually, either in LR or within the file manager of your OS. LR lets you change the EXIF date on your images, but again, once the images are in LR there isn't a way to reorganize based on EXIF data (unless you remove them from the database and then reimport them).
 
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I'll have to kindly disagree with Paige. I like having my images sorted into dated folders, as much as possible. I don't make it a huge effort to do it manually if my older images didn't have the EXIF data, but when the EXIF data is there I'm glad that LR does organize them by folder.

Why?

Not because I want access to the folders outside of LR. I agree with Paige, no point in trying to use folders outside of LR— Lightrooms organization and filtering makes it a lot easier to find photos quickly.

BUT, within LR, having the images organized by date as much as possible makes is REALLY easy to find photos by date within the LR database. I don't have to create a filter to find those dates. I can just quickly browse the Folder heirarchy and there they are. I select the 2''9 folder and I see all the photos from 2''9. I select the subfolder for March, and there are all the photos I shot in March of 2''9. Dig deeper to the day, and I've filtered it down even more... without having to recall what date I want to create a search filter for and without having to create a smart category.
 
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Jim
I hope you can handle conflicting advice - you're about to get some!!

If I have read your other thread correctly, you are in a position where you have no raws (or few) with their attendant 'develop history' to worry about. In other words, if my reading is correct, you could delete the entire LR catalogue and not lose anything.

If I were in your position, I would first decide on 2 issues:

1. Do you intend to stick to raw only with the 'slight' problems of xmp sidecar files or would you prefer to convert your raws to dng with its single file-handling retaining your raws (or not) outside the catalogue as the ultimate failsafe.
2. Are you sure that you will allocate, for example, keywords to ALL your images and, therefore, have little need for folder structure or are you, like me, a little bit dependent on a folder structure to find an old image which you may or may not have keyworded. If the latter then there is some real advantage in having a date structure which you have outlined accompanied by a 'job' name for each sub folder. On the other hand, Peter Krogh, a much respected author, would advocate having 'buckets' as folders almost totally reliant upon size that will fill a CD and putting faith in the keywords to return ALL your images.
 
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ok let me answer some of these questions, NOTHING has been imported to lightroom yet, uppon good avice from kiwi i watied to import anyhting until i got used to it (thanks for a great tip to a newb!!!). There might be 2' nef files (nikon raw) and none have even been processed other than to convert a copy of them from CS3 and doing a save as so that i still have the nef origional. Nothing has been processed in lightroom yet. Im asking all the questions and doing all this before i do anything so that when i start its in a good format.

As for key wording, up until now i have only used picassa and have not labled anything. There are some images that i renamed to give them some hint of a lable but these are very old images and there only in a couple folders which i could very eaisly manualy input into the file system.

Im leaning towards going with theyear month feature for backup use as well as burn off to cd's/dvd's for off comp storage. Size of folders is no issue ill just burn more disks.
 
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Additional thoughts:

Drewmark says he finds things easily within folders by date. Although I do have (and specifically said) I put new photos into folders by capture date ... my mind doesn't think by date. Unless its a birthday or wedding, I have no idea what date my photos were taken. I suspect this is true with most people, and if that applies to you, then re-organizing existing folders by date is a waste of time. (If you are someone who does remember what dates your photos were taken, then go ahead and re-organize by date — although there are still more effective ways of organizing even in that case.) When I want to find that really great photo of a barn, I look in Lightroom under barns. I don't have to know that it was August 12, 2''8 (oh wait, was it August 14? Or maybe it was 2''7...)

If, as Samdring says, you don't apply keywords regularly to files ... then this is hardly Lightroom's fault, but the solution then is to apply keywords religiously to your files. The solution is not to rely upon an organizing system (Windows) that was not designed for photos. After I made sure every photo had appropriate keywords, and new ones got keywords shortly after import, my ability to find my photos skyrocketed. There isn't a photo that I have trouble finding. If you, pirahnha3, are starting new with Lightroom and keywords, again I urge you to plan to do a thorough job and then follow through and do a good job in Lightroom ... do not go with a system that relies partially upon keywords in Lightroom where you sometimes have keywords and sometimes don't, and the rest of the time you rely upon an outmoded dinosaur of a filing system like Windows to help you find your photos.
 
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Jim, it can depend on how much space your image files take on your HD and how much spare sace you have.
A very workable method, if you have the space is to import the files in to LR using copy to a new location. At that point LR will make copies of your files (hence the need for available space) and you will have the option at that point for them to be placed in a date structured folder hierachy.
Try a small experiment with this.
 
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ahhhh that would work, i have plenty of free space to use (i have about 2TB of free room right now haha so ill give it a shot. see if it works and what happens
 
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Keep us informed mate!!:lol::lol:
 
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