Lightroom creates thousands of folders

[alba63]

Hello, my name is Bernie (from Berlin) and I am new here.

Up to now (while using LR 1.xx) I used LR as an advanced RAW converter more or less, and managed my photos with iMatch. However from now on I want to use LR also as a photo database, plus further editing in Photoshop.

My main question for now is: When importing the photos (being already on my physical harddrive) into the database - importing method is "at their current location" - Lightroom seems to create one folder for each image!!

Is this normal and can it be avoided? Having some 1'.''' or 15.''' photos in the database, Lightroom creates this huge folder structure of many thousands of folders - I have never seen that with any program. Certain search programs (even the simple windows search) can easily struggle with this, and it is not very practical to manually exclude the LR folders each and every time.

I understand that LR has to create "secondary files" for the non- destructive editing operations, but I imagine this could also be done by placing the files in one single folder.

So, is there a way to avoid LR to create thousands and thousands of folders on the harddisk?

My second question is: When synchronizing a main folder structure (in this case some 7k-8k photos from my traves in Asia, original JPEGs, edited Tiffs with typically 3' to 1''MB), how long should this process typically take on a reasonably fast dual core PC: More in the range of 1-2 minutes, or 5, 1', 3' minutes? I feel that it first takes at least 1'-15min to "pre- check", before the actual importing actually begins.

Thank you in advance for any useful help

Bernie

 

[Brad Snyder]

Bernie, Welcome to LR Forums.

Are you talking about the folder "catalogname".lrdata ? Which by default lives next to the LR database "catalogname".lrcat ?

If so, that's the preview cache, and yes, that's how it works, creating a fairly large folder tree. The previews are being hashed into a set of as many as 64k subfolders. This strange structure has to do with speed of retrieval.
The cache itself is necessary to the smooth operation of LR. It is transitory, and you can, to a certain extent configure how long the files reside in the cache with the preferences settings. You can even delete the whole works, but LR will rebuild it, when next you start.

As for speed of import of RGB types, I can't say, I rarely work with them. If they were raws, I'd expect it to be in the range of hours. Anybody else have an idea about TIFFs or JPGs?

 

[alba63]

Are you talking about the folder "catalogname".lrdata ? Which by default lives next to the LR database "catalogname".lrcat ?

If so, that's the preview cache, and yes, that's how it works, creating a fairly large folder tree. The previews are being hashed into a set of as many as 64k subfolders.

Thank you Brad, yes, I mean the "(catalogname)-Previews.lrdata"- Folder. I understand that it creates an individual folder for each and every photo, but I guess with the right naming it could find the respective files also when they are put into one folder.

For the mess that 1'k of folders can create on the HD I have - for now - found the solution of making the folder structure invisible. LR still finds them, but the search function and search tools can be easily programmed not to search in hidden folders.

In respect to sycronyzing time, I forgot indeed to list the RAW files, I shoot a lot of RAW. So probably it is normal that rescanning 6' or 8'GB of data can take some time

Thanks
Bernie

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Bernie, welcome to the forum! And Brad, great answer! So clearly explained!