How ti delete hundreds of useless 'Collections' from LR 6.14 catalog

[FrankU]

Lightroom Version Number

6.14

Operating System

1. macOS 10.14 Mojave

I had moved my old images to a cloud storage and thereby lost my previous old Catalog completely. I loaded all new locations onto LR (which took weeks to do (40,ooo images)and now all old images are again in a new catalog with slightly different source locations. All works well, but now my erstwhile 'collections' all show up under their old name but all have 0 photos in them; they are all empty.
(1) Is there a way to add a few further folder names to the front of the previously collected images such as 'cloud/FS/... 'to what used to be under ' SonyNex7/2013/month.... etc dates' before in the old catalog. Where are the image names of an old collection? Can they be retrieved somehow? The new catalogue has all stars associated with the images and keywords, exif etc which is wonderful.

(2) I think that resurrecting the old collections somehow may be a pipe dream and I would like to batch delete all those useless old vacuous 'collections' from my new catalog. Can that be done in some way. I have right clicked on a few and hit delete. Then i have to click on another " Ok to delete" button and that collection is done, deleted; great. But doing so 200+ times seems sooo ineffective. How can I do this in a batch type of way, to delete all those nonsense vacuous collections from my current new LR catalogue collections list, that is the question. Any help?

I did try to get help on switching from back-up drive image storage to cloud storage and I tried to maintain my then current and usable LR catalogue but could not see nor get a feasible way how to do this from this site; sorry ... . So I rebuilt the catalogue from scratch and i did it laboriously, by adding files upon files from all my cameras to the new catalogue, day in and night out, for about 2 weeks, continuously , depending on the internet speed i had ... and where I was traveling. Somedays 4,000 images a day were added, sometimes 1 ,000 images. Did that Mac have to work! But it did it well.

 

[Paul McFarlane]

(2) I think that resurrecting the old collections somehow may be a pipe dream and I would like to batch delete all those useless old vacuous 'collections' from my new catalog. Can that be done in some way. I have right clicked on a few and hit delete. Then i have to click on another " Ok to delete" button and that collection is done, deleted; great. But doing so 200+ times seems sooo ineffective. How can I do this in a batch type of way, to delete all those nonsense vacuous collections from my current new LR catalogue collections list, that is the question. Any help?

On this point, you can select multiple Collections in the Collections panel, then with all the ones you want to delete, right-click, it'll ask you just once if you want to delete, then they're gone.

 

[FrankU]

Thanks Paul, so there is hope ... I did try this approach, but I could not, do not know how to select multiple collections in LR: I scroll down to the 'Collections,' then I can click on one, its turns white in background, but I cannot see how to light up several collections all at once. Dragging the mouse down does nothing, doing the "shift down' trick does not work. either. So how can I highlight multiple collections which is what I would love to do ? ?

 

[LouieSherwin]

Shift-click will select a range from the last selected collection.
Cmd-click adds to the selection.

-louie

 

[FrankU]

This has worked, thanks!