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Missing subfolder structure

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Juliette

Juliette

Juliette
Premium Cloud Member
Joined
May 19, 2019
Messages
35
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Cloud Service
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic 10.3
Operating System
  1. macOS 11 Big Sur
I am grateful for this forum because I've gotten a lot of help here so far. I need to understand something in order to move forward with my new workflow.

I now switched to importing all raw photos into LR CC using the 1TB cloud space that I have. I created a new flow based on this and it's going well ... except....

My sync folder started getting to large. This morning I opted to store the sync folder on an external drive.

Classic preferences up until now had been to use this folder /Pictures/Sync/ and my personal choice of subfolder structure, which is 2021-06-12, as an example. Now since the move completed, the sync folder no longer retains the subfolders. Everything got dumped into /External-Drive/Sync/ so I have thousands of images in that one folder.

Is there a way to get my subfolder structure back? Should I move my sync folder back to my hard drive and do something different?

Let me know if this is not enough information please.
 
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I think that option to automatically move the contents of the existing designated sync downloads folder to a new location is fairly new. I don't recall it being introduced, and I'm fairly sure it didn't offer that option in the past. But, having just tested it then I'm afraid you are correct, it does not retain the current sub-folder organisation, so all the images in the old structure are dumped into the new designated folder, even if a dated sub-folder scheme was still set. I assume that's a bug, which I'll report to Adobe, but that won't help you very much in the meantime. I can't think of a simple way out of the issue, moving the folder back to the old drive isn't going to solve the problem. Reverting to a backup catalog AND have the old structure restored from backup may work, but I'm not clear what exactly would happen when you launch the restored catalog as the preferences that you changed will still be changed.....hopefully you would get the same dialog asking if you want the download folder and images moved to the new location and this time you would decline the offer (then subsequently you could move the structure to the new location from within the LrC Folders Panel). But it's a bit speculative, I'm afraid.

How much of a disaster is this? Personally speaking, I'd be annoyed about it but it wouldn't actually cause me any issues as I don't tend to access images in Classic via the folder structure.
 
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Thank you for responding, @Jim Wilde and I actually started reverting from a backup as I was waiting for feedback. Classic is now rebuilding my sync, I hope (it is taking a lot of time).

We'll see where it ends up but I think when it completes, I'll see if I can weed through my sync folder to see if I can dump any unnecessary files. You are right. It's not a disaster, but it is an annoyance.

I'm thinking after this is over to stop syncing altogether. Now that I am using Cloudy mostly, rarely make extensive edits (though want to have that option), it might be better to pull in the RAW image from a back up. Not sure yet.

Thanks for the feedback.
 
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Now that I have confirmed that selecting an external drive for my sync folder destroys my folder hierarchy, I moved the sync preference back to my hard drive /pictures/sync/ but I have one more question please. What exactly happens if I were to say, drag one folder out of sync and onto an external drive from within Lightroom? What will happen on the Cloudy side? Does it remove the photo entirely?
 
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No, you can safely do that and they will retain their sync status. The location that you set in Preferences is not specifically for "synced images", it's technically for those images that are downloaded from the cloud....of course that means those images are synced, but it doesn't mean all synced images can only be in that folder and sub-folders. Don't forget that any images directly imported into Classic, no matter what folders they are in, can be synced to the cloud.
 
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