Importing album into Lightroom CC (cloud)

[noruassub]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom CC latest

Operating System

1. macOS 10.14 Mojave

Hey guys,

I have a bunch of photos - organised by folders on my external hard drive - that I would like to import into my Lightroom CC cloud storage.

I would like the photos to be imported into Lightroom CC cloud storage as albums that mimic the name and contents of the folders from the hard-drive, but I don't seem to be able to work out how to do this. Currently I am having to manually add the separate groups of photos into new albums in the cloud storage, which will take many hours of work when importing years and years worth of photos.

Am I missing something here? Is there a way to import, and then for Lightroom CC to automatically add the photos to albums based on the folder names within which they were stored on my external drive? Hope this makes sense!

Please help me

 

[clee01l]

You will have to import each folder one at a time. Prior to importing you will be given the opportunity to review the contents of the folder and to designate an "Album"

 

[mikebore]

You will have to import each folder one at a time. Prior to importing you will be given the opportunity to review the contents of the folder and to designate an "Album"

When I did this, I had about 500 albums in Classic, basically in about 20 "year" folders and 25 albums in each. As Cletus said I did it one folder (year) at a time. After importing each year I moved the albums into a new "year" folder in Lightroom Cloudy before adding the next year (otherwise the albums from the two years are mixed up). So only 20 imports, laborious but better than 500.
Note that your Classic originals structure is not preserved in Cloudy. Originals in Cloudy are date based. I keep a separate backup set of originals in my structure from which I could recover if necessary.

 

[noruassub]

Tha

When I did this, I had about 500 albums in Classic, basically in about 20 "year" folders and 25 albums in each. As Cletus said I did it one folder (year) at a time. After importing each year I moved the albums into a new "year" folder in Lightroom Cloudy before adding the next year (otherwise the albums from the two years are mixed up). So only 20 imports, laborious but better than 500.
Note that your Classic originals structure is not preserved in Cloudy. Originals in Cloudy are date based. I keep a separate backup set of originals in my structure from which I could recover if necessary.

Thanks for helping. My structure is very similar to yours. The thing is I want all those albums within the years (from Classic) to be auto added as albums without me having to go in and both rename them and reorganise them all, but it sounds like that won't be possible, right?

So what I have to do is import each year, add to a folder in CC, then manually create albums within that year folder to mimic the old folders within the years that I had on classic? Is that about right?

 

[noruassub]

Th

When I did this, I had about 500 albums in Classic, basically in about 20 "year" folders and 25 albums in each. As Cletus said I did it one folder (year) at a time. After importing each year I moved the albums into a new "year" folder in Lightroom Cloudy before adding the next year (otherwise the albums from the two years are mixed up). So only 20 imports, laborious but better than 500.
Note that your Classic originals structure is not preserved in Cloudy. Originals in Cloudy are date based. I keep a separate backup set of originals in my structure from which I could recover if necessary.

Thanks for commenting and helping.

 

[clee01l]

Thanks for helping. My structure is very similar to yours. The thing is I want all those albums within the years (from Classic) to be auto added as albums without me having to go in and both rename them and reorganise them all, but it sounds like that won't be possible, right?

Lightroom Cloudy does not use folders. The principle storage location for cloudy originals is the Adobe cloud. Adobe uses special algorithms to create folders and catalog your images and keep them separate from everyone else. Yes, date named folders could be a part of that algorithm, but I've never seen the Cloud file storage area. I would suspect the cloud folder structure is organized something like the "Previews...lrdata". folder structure in Classic.

An important point missed by many Lightroom users: Folders are a poor organization tool with too many deficiencies. The SMEs at Adobe have long recognized this and have not made it within the users control in "cloudy"

 

[noruassub]

That’s fine it just means I’m gonna have to spend an inordinate amount of time adding the stuff. Anyway they don’t need to add folders, I want them to add albums based on the folders which I’m importing them from. That’s all. You’d think there’d be a function to do that ‍

 

[clee01l]

That’s fine it just means I’m gonna have to spend an inordinate amount of time adding the stuff. Anyway they don’t need to add folders, I want them to add albums based on the folders which I’m importing them from. That’s all. You’d think there’d be a function to do that ‍♂

Lightroom Cloudy has concentrated on making the app efficient accessing the cloud. There is a lot of functionality that has to make a Windows/Mac version functionally equivalent with the iOS/Android version. To some extent, the mobile OS limitations determine what can be done in cloudy for Mac & Windows. Only Classic remains feature rich. I hope to see all of that Classic functionality added one day to cloudy. Color Labels and hierarchal keywords are two missing features. Smart Albums (based upon metadata like Smart Collections would be a nice to have too.

 

[noruassub]

Lightroom Cloudy has concentrated on making the app efficient accessing the cloud. There is a lot of functionality that has to make a Windows/Mac version functionally equivalent with the iOS/Android version. To some extent, the mobile OS limitations determine what can be done in cloudy for Mac & Windows. Only Classic remains feature rich. I hope to see all of that Classic functionality added one day to cloudy. Color Labels and hierarchal keywords are two missing features. Smart Albums (based upon metadata like Smart Collections would be a nice to have too.

Hopefully it gets added eventually. But damn, some type of macro to create albums based on source folders - I would not think that would be too complicated. Anyway, I know what I will be doing the next few nights when the kids are in bed!

Also FML can't believe there are no colour tags! They were so damn useful!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

You could do it via Classic, even an expired trial would do. Import set to add at the existing location, then convert the folder structure to collections, then migrate to Cloudy using the migration tool. Should save you some time.

 

[clee01l]

You could do it via Classic, even an expired trial would do. Import set to add at the existing location, then convert the folder structure to collections, then migrate to Cloudy using the migration tool. Should save you some time.

Won't that only convert Classic Collections to Albums? AFAIK Classic folder names are irrelevant in Cloudy which only exposes Albums to the user.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Won't that only convert Classic Collections to Albums? AFAIK Classic folder names are irrelevant in Cloudy which only exposes Albums to the user.

Yes, but there's a Convert Folders to Collections command added in about 7.2 (from memory) that would convert the folder names to collection names, ready to then convert into albums during migration.

 

[clee01l]

You could do it via Classic, even an expired trial would do. Import set to add at the existing location, then convert the folder structure to collections, then migrate to Cloudy using the migration tool. Should save you some time.

I could only find the context menu item {Create Collection "(folderName)"}. which would mean manually creating collections for folders one folder at a time. Adding Classic to the one time workflow seems like over kill.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Are you right-clicking on a parent folder? It's the Create Collection Set command that reproduces the hierarchy using Collection Sets and Collections.

 

[clee01l]

Are you right-clicking on a parent folder? It's the Create Collection Set command that reproduces the hierarchy using Collection Sets and Collections.

The Menu Item was not clear that creating a collection set would also populate the subs folders as named collections. In the Collection Panel, Collection Set command creates and empty Collection Set Container

 

[Victoria Bampton]

The Menu Item was not clear

It's Adobe!!

 

[mikebore]

So what I have to do is import each year, add to a folder in CC, then manually create albums within that year folder to mimic the old folders within the years that I had on classic? Is that about right?

No. When I imported a year folder, all its albums appeared in the sidebar of Cloudy. All I had to do then is create a year folder and drag the just imported albums up into it. Rinse and repeat for subsequent years.

Note I did this by importing my Classic masters with their xmp directly, not using the Classic app and collections.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

It would be interesting to understand how Mike, since Classic's collections aren't stored in XMP. Perhaps you'd already synced up from Classic though?

 

[mikebore]

It would be interesting to understand how Mike, since Classic's collections aren't stored in XMP. Perhaps you'd already synced up from Classic though?

In Classic I had saved all changes to XMP sidecar files. I created The Cloudy Library by importing directly the Classic masters and their XMPs. Cloudy respects Classic XMPs. Sync in my Classic is not turned on and I didn't use any Collections. I keep Classic and Cloudy in very separate boxes.

I don't know if this answers your question.

As far as I can tell from 18 months use of my Cloudy library created this way it has worked fine. Note I don't use keywords at all so I wouldn't know if my method does not support keywords.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

You said “When I imported a year folder, all its albums appeared in the sidebar of Cloudy” and now you say “I was didn't use any Collections”, so what albums are you talking about? Lightroom Classic does not have albums. Do you perhaps mean that Lightroom shows an organisation by date? It does that by reading the capture date in the metadata of the image.

 

[mikebore]

You said “When I imported a year folder, all its albums appeared in the sidebar of Cloudy” and now you say “I was didn't use any Collections”, so what albums are you talking about? Lightroom Classic does not have albums. Do you perhaps mean that Lightroom shows an organisation by date? It does that by reading the capture date in the metadata of the image.

My Classic masters are organised in top level year folders with topic subfolders in each. I imported these masters to Cloudy without Classic being involved. (except for previously generating the XMPs)

I realise I have probably confused things by interchanging "albums" and "folders". Apologies for this. When I imported a year folder into Cloudy it's subfolders came with it and and appeared in the Cloudy Sidebar, but not in a folder. I then created a year folder and dragged the subfolders up into it and the subfolders became albums. Then moved on to the next year.

End result is that my Cloudy has the same structure (mine) as my Classic. The pure capture time organisation that Cloudy uses by default would not work my hotch-potch of scans, photos without exif, copies of old photos etc

 

[Victoria Bampton]

When I imported a year folder into Cloudy it's subfolders came with it and and appeared in the Cloudy Sidebar, but not in a folder. I then created a year folder and dragged the subfolders up into it and the subfolders became albums. Then moved on to the next year.

Can you grab us a screenshot Mike, to show which bit? Sounds like we're all intrigued!

 

[mikebore]

Can you grab us a screenshot Mike, to show which bit? Sounds like we're all intrigued!

OK this embarrassing. I just tried to reproduce the method I thought I had used and failing. I did all this 18 months ago, when Cloudy was completely new to me, and at the time also experimented with other ways of using Cloudy and Classic and syncing, which involved many dead ends and starting all over. (The whole grisly saga is recorded in this monster thread). I think my memory has failed me...I did not import direct from the Classic masters.

Re-reading that thread I believe now that I exported and migrated catalogs from Classic to Cloudy in the standard way (Migrate photos and videos from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom), but I did them one year at a time. This resulted in the situation that each year catalog appeared in bottom of the Cloudy sidebar, with its subfolders in tact, and I then created the year folder and dragged the subfolders/albums up into the just created year folder, then moving on to the next year.

I can't remember the reason for doing it year by year, but I believe it was because I thought (maybe mistakenly) that if I did the migration of the whole 70K Classic catalog in one go I would lose the year structure in Cloudy, and that all 500 subfolders from Classic would appear in one great list in Cloudy. My subfolder names were not such as to make it easy to put them back into the correct year folders.

Does what I am now saying make more sense? Apologies for misleading.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Ah that would make sense. Thank you for solving that mystery for us!

 

[mikebore]

Ah that would make sense. Thank you for solving that mystery for us!

And was I correct that migrating all in a single large catalog would have resulted in 500 subfolders in Cloudy, needing to be put into year folders?