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Moving files?

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frostbytes

frostbytes

Active Member
Joined
Jan 10, 2009
Messages
104
Location
Canada
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
8.0
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
Because of ongoing problems with Lightroom's folder view (hello Adobe?) I've decided to reorganize the physical folder structure for my hundreds of thousands of photos.

My current folder structure looks like this:

YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name
x many shoots

I'll be reorganizing to this format:

[2017]
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name
- etc.
[2018]
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name
- etc.
[2019]
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name
- etc.

What's the best way or reorganizing this so that I minimize any downtime with Lightroom? Do I reorganize the files with Windows Explorer and then click a million times in Lightroom to find missing files or is there a better way?
 
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Hal P Anderson said:
Renaming in bulk is incredibly hard to recover from unless you do it within Lightroom. Moving a whole directory structure outside of Lightroom can be recovered from with a couple of clicks
Click to expand...
Amen brother.
 
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clee01l said:
As soon as you rename outside of LR, you then lose the internal reference to the path and have to manually find these folders again in LR. There is no automated renaming utility that works inside Lightroom
Click to expand...
yes. I've discovered that if I want to rename files in bulk, in my case including YYYYMMDD and a sequence number in the file name, it's best to do that rename before importing into Lightroom. I currently use Downloader Pro, but it doesn't handle XMP files, which means I can't use it after I cull photos with Fast RAW Previewer.

Phil Burton
 
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There is no automated renaming utility that works inside Lightroom
Click to expand...
More precisely "There is no automated folder renaming utility that works inside Lightroom" . Such utility exists in LR for filename.
 
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Philippe Coudé du Foresto said:
More precisely "There is no automated folder renaming utility that works inside Lightroom" . Such utility exists in LR for filename.
Click to expand...
Phillippe,

What is the name of the utility for file renaming inside LR?

Phil Burton
 
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PhilBurton said:
Phillippe,

What is the name of the utility for file renaming inside LR?

Phil Burton
Click to expand...
The name is ‘Lightroom Classic CC’. :)
Seriously; it’s not a ‘utility’ (which suggests something separate), it’s a Lightroom menu.
 
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More precisely, it's in the menu Library>Rename photos. It can also be called by pressing the key <F2>.
There, you can define a rule for renaming, using text as well as metadata (like capture date) and/or counters. You can save the rule and apply it to a group of selected photos.
 
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Philippe Coudé du Foresto said:
More precisely, it's in the menu Library>Rename photos. It can also be called by pressing the key <F2>.
There, you can define a rule for renaming, using text as well as metadata (like capture date) and/or counters. You can save the rule and apply it to a group of selected photos.
Click to expand...
I am aware of that feature. However, there is no automatic "reset to 1 on new date" for the counter name option. That's why I was hoping there was a plug-in that had that option.

Phil
 
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Philippe Coudé du Foresto said:
Just out of curiosity, why do you need to start the counter at 1 for each day ?
Click to expand...
Good question that deserves a good answer. I started to use this naming scheme: YYYYMMDD-seqn, with the Adobe-created seqn. Then I got some comments about how weird it was to have something like 20180915-4824. As in, "What happened to the first 4823? " The request was for a seqn that started with 1 each day. Unfortunately, Adobe's naming scheme doesn't have a "reset to 0001 on date change" option, unlike something like Downloader Pro - What's new in version 2 that will populate a folder with new imports before starting Lightroom.

One implication of this Adobe lack is that if I delete some images after import, and I want to renumber to eliminate gaps, I have to manually reset the seqn to 1 each time.
 
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Hi frostbytes / all,

I am following this thread because I am also about to move and reorganize "some" images soon.

[2017]
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name
- etc.

I have used the above structure you are intending to use for quite many years and it worked technically very well for me.
I am generally a fan or chronological systems such as the above however I am planning to re-organize everything due to the fact that after years it is difficult to find things because if you are looking for something specific you always needc to know the year.

I admit I should have listened to Scott Kelby some years ago but I thought a chronological system is perfect but its not I realized.

Therefore I am planning to Change to a category based system such as the below.

[Family]
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name

[Landscape]
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name

[Travel]
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name

[Sports]
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name

etc.

In the main category folders such as family there will also be sub category folders such as for family members

I think this will make it much easier to find stuff because you always know the category where one shoot should be located.
Any opinions about this system?

Regards,
Tom
 
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Since you're using LR, you have all the search tools you need to find your images. The OS folder system is there to manage computer files, whereas LR is there to manage images.
Imagine you have a picture of one of your family's member taken during a travel. You then think it's also a good portrait and decide to make a virtual copy to have a specific developpement (crop, for exemple) as a portrait. So you have only one file, but two images. With your folder system, how will you find this portrait ? Within LR, it's simple to have 2 collections, one for the travel and one for the portrait. You don't mind if the images comes from the same or from different computer files.
Another reason to use date organisation, is that it allows a totally automtized (via import preset) import of the files, which garantee to always have the same organisation. Having a manual intervention on import might sooner or later make a mistake which will lead to files being imported in the wrong place.
However, I recognize that having a comment in the folder name might sometimes be helpful, espiecially when looking at them outside of LR (which I don't do very often !). Hence my organization :

- The files are imported in a folder named YYYY\YYYY-MM-DD (automated via import preset, so no risk of error)
- I then rename inside LR the folder to add a comment while keeping the date structure, something like "YYYY\YYYY-MM-DD Aunt anniversary"
- If the event is spread over several days (like a travel), I move all the photos to the first day folder (which I've renamed using the above convention) and suppress all the other folders.
This takes only one or 2 mouse clicks, but garantee (since automated) a coherent and easy import.

I then use keywords, IPTC and collections to organize, comment and make searchable all the images, which is very fast and easy in LR. One of the advantage of the keywords is that they can be exported with the final image, and are compatible whith any immage magement tool. This means that when I send the photo to someone else, he wil get the keywords and IPTC and can use them to organize and search in his tool.
 
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Assuming you don't live in Paris, Tom, into which folder will you put a wide angle photo of the city which includes a member of the family, though not very obviously? Into Travel, Landscape, or Family? It could fit any three, so do you want to spend time moving stuff around? What if you only notice the family member later, after deciding the picture belongs in Travel? What if you later decide to add Street or Urban as top level folders? So you move stuff around again, meaning that your backup no longer reflects where files are?

These are downfalls of using folders to subjectively categorize your pictures, and they really aren't flexible enough for all the ways we might think of or categorize pictures. So:
  • Folders for physical storage - YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name is fine - date is objective. Leave the photos where they are.
  • Keywords and other metadata for categorization - can be as fluid as you want
  • Collections for grouping and gathering - arbitrary and useful
So I encourage you not to put your time into moving stuff around - put it into adding keywords and other metadata.

John
 
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Hi and thanks for your coomments.

Philippe: I fully agree with you, I have my folder structure like this
[2017]
- YYYY-MM-DD Shoot Name

...and I intend to keep it like that for the physical location of my pictures on the disc. I am sorry that I forgot to mention that my re-organzing plan with categories is what I want to do with my collections structure.

@John: This Paris picture would for me go into travel since it was obviously a trip or a holiday there. BUT it might well be that I take a a nice portrait of one person on this trip so these I could put as virtual copies also under this persons folder., meaning there are 2 possiblilities to find this when I am looking for it and I will find it in both of them.

Basically the reason why I want to do this job to re-organize my collections with this system is because it happened quite many times that I was looking for something I had to go through many of the year folders to find the shoot I was looking for.

Regards,
Tom
 
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Which is why one should not put effort into folder structures that categorize your photos. Save that time and put it into keywords and other metadata, and then into collections which make use of these tags. You don't even need VCs for this .
 
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Not very different from the folder system you described in your post 35, Tom. It varies over time, so this year I added a top level collection set "London Walks " when I started doing long daily walks, and this contains a mix of smart collections (eg City Contains Dulwich) to gather everything from the area, and dumb collections such as Dulwich Park, which is a "best of" for one of the projects I have been working on.

But the key approach is folders for storage, keywords and other metadata to describe and categorise, and then collections to collect or gather pictures for however I want to use them.
 
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