Missing subfolders with capture dates in Lightroom Classic

[Qigong Bill]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic

Operating System

1. macOS 11 Big Sur

Hello!

I recently migrated photos from the Lightroom cloud to Lightroom Classic on a portable hard drive connected to my new computer, Once I figured out how to do it (which took a while), the process worked seamlessly. All the photos are viewable in Classic, but there are no subfolders showing dates of capture. Is that normal? Or did I miss checking a box which would have placed the folders in a folder structure? If I missed something, can I redo it?

 

[Jim Wilde]

Yes, you probably did miss something.....in the Lightroom Classic Preferences>Lightroom Sync tab there's an option to specify the location of all downloaded images from the cloud, and a secondary option allows you to specify one of the standard date-based folder schemes. If you didn't select that option, obviously you wouldn't get those sub-folders.

Sadly, there's no easy "redo" option.....if you attempt to remove the images from Classic in the hope that they would download again, that would be a major mistake. Once downloaded, any synced images removed from the Classic catalog will automatically be deleted from the cloud!

One course of action would be to reorganise the images in Classic manually using drag and drop in the Folders Panel. It's actually easier than it sounds, just a bit time-consuming depending on the level of granularity you want in the folder structure. You could start by simply setting up "year" folders, then use the Library filter to sort All Photographs by Date, pick a year at a time, select them, drag them to the corresponding year folder, drop them there. Repeat as needed. Later on, you could do something similar to break each year into month sub-folders.

Another method, which is a sort of "redo" and which I'd probably use, would be to create a new empty catalog and set that to sync (after first setting those two options on the Lightroom Sync tab of course). That gets everything downloaded into Classic into the sub-folders that you want, but in the short term you would have used double the amount of disk space locally, as the initial catalog and images files should be retained until you are sure you have everything setup correctly.

 

[Qigong Bill]

Thanks very much for your very authoritative response! I definitely missed something and may try the “redo.” Meanwhile, I continue using Lightroom CC and am not completely sure (given the improvements in CC) whether it is desirable to switch to Classic. What do you think are the primary benefits of using Classic?

 

[Jim Wilde]

What do you think are the primary benefits of using Classic?

There's no simple answer to that. There are an awful lot of features that Classic has that Lightroom doesn't, so for many users it's a bit of a no-brainer to prefer Classic. But that rather misses the point that not everyone needs or wants those additional features, and some potential users are put off by what they see as Classic's complexities, so what would be seen as a strength by one set of users could be seen as a weakness by a different set. My best advice would be to examine the differences, then decide for yourself the importance of them. See this post: Lightroom cloud ecosystem vs. Lightroom Classic - which do I need? | The Lightroom Queen