• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.
  • Dark mode now has a single preference for the whole site! It's a simple toggle switch in the bottom right-hand corner of any page. As it uses a cookie to store your preference, you may need to dismiss the cookie banner before you can see it. Any problems, please let us know!

Library module / Top level folder

Status
Not open for further replies.

kikapoo

Member
Joined
Jun 28, 2014
Messages
63
Location
California
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version Number
11.0.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 12 Monterey
See screenshot...how can I move all the contents from the folder "/" into the folder "Library"?
Thanks, Kathleen

Screen Shot 2021-12-03 at 5.28.21 AM.png
 
Back up your catalog, then right-click on the / folder and choose Hide This Parent. Then do the same with the Volumes folder. Then restart LR and show us an updated screenshot to confirm everything's good.
 
The number 94056 you are seeing doesn't correspond to any photos stored in the root folder of your Macintosh HD. It is the sum of all the photos in the subfolders (Volumes, Public etc) that are currently imported into LrC. So all your 94056 photos are actually stored inside the Shared Pictures folder and/or any of the subfolders there (not shown in your screenshot).

You see this view because you have the Show photos in subfolders option enabled. Uncheck if you want from the Library menu.

DO NOT move any files into the special Library or Users folders. Both the Library folder and the Users folder have stuff inside them (even photos) But LrC shows only the photos that you have explicitly imported from any specific folder.

If you don't want to see, inside LrC, all the topmost folders (above Shared Pictures) start by right-clicking on the root folder / and choose Hide this parent. Then do the same on the Volumes folder, and the Public folder. Be careful not to go very far down or you may delete your photos: the rule is that the parent folder you are hiding must have the same number of photos as its immediate child folder.
 
Thank you Victoria and Y.K.
Below is the screenshot taken after 'hiding' the Parent folder /
Screen Shot 2021-12-05 at 5.13.13 AM.png
If this is what it is supposed to look like, then all's well! (And thank you for the additional explanation).

I have another question:
Recently I requested and received very valuable help with a problem I had created by using asterisks in my folder names. It was a MAJOR fix and took days to fix. Along the way, someone said that it is better to do my editing in 'Collections' rather than in 'Folders'. What is the reason for this? I used to use Collections, but it is so slow when I rename the individual 'collections' names! The 'beachball' spins forever each time I make a change! In 'Folders', there is no delay at all.
Thank you,
Kathleen
 
Below is the screenshot taken after 'hiding' the Parent folder /
Screen Shot 2021-12-05 at 5.13.13 AM.png
If this is what it is supposed to look like, then all's well! (And thank you for the additional explanation).
No, this is not how it is supposed to look like. Is your external disk called 'Public'? If so, then hide the 'Volumes' folder and restart Lightroom. Now the disk should show as a disk, instead of as a folder on your internal hard disk.
 
You can hide, the same way, the Volumes and Public Folders

Additionally, you can right click on each of the Library and Users folders and choose remove: its ok to do it because they have 0 files imported into Lightroom . These folders will not be removed from the disk - they will just not show within LrC. You can do such operations in the future only if the file count of a folder is zero and they don't show any subfolders with no-zero items
 
Following on from Victoria's comments, there are other folders shown that could be hidden. Right click on the folder "Shared Pictures" and select "Hide Parent" from the context menu. that should hide every folder showing above that has the image count of "94056"
 
Following on from Victoria's comments, there are other folders shown that could be hidden. Right click on the folder "Shared Pictures" and select "Hide Parent" from the context menu. that should hide every folder showing above that has the image count of "94056"
I don't think that will work. AFAIK, you only get to see the 'Hide This Parent' menu on a top folder.
 
Along the way, someone said that it is better to do my editing in 'Collections' rather than in 'Folders'. What is the reason for this? I used to use Collections, but it is so slow when I rename the individual 'collections' names! The 'beachball' spins forever each time I make a change!

First of all, there might have been some problem with your catalog (corruption, not optimised etc) that was responsible for the slowness and the beachball. Usually, using collections is very fast, with no problems.

Folders are places where photos are stored, on the disk. LrC shows only the folders that have photos that were explicitly imported into LrC. You can organise your photos in categories by moving the photos from one folder to another, creating new (sub) folders and so on. The problem with this method is that any particular photo must be stored in only one (sub)folder. So you can organise a photo in only one way (folder hierarchy): You cannot have the same photo inside a folder: Kathleen and inside a folder Birthdays ( Well, you can - but then you must put a different physical copy on each folder - if you edit the photo in one folder, the other, completely independent photo will not change )

The other problem is with backups: Say you backup your folders each Sunday, and you re-organize your photos within folders on Mon-Tue-Wed, If on Thursday your disk crashes / get deleted and you want to restore the folders from the backup disk, you will get back the Sunday folder structure. So your organisation will be lost. The same goes with the LrC catalog backups: Say you do backups daily. In the above example, If you need to restore on Friday, the LrC catalog from Tuesday (because on Wednesday you removed some edits of metadata from some photos) then the Tuesday's LrC catalog expects to find all the photos, as they were on the disk on Tuesday - But you may have moved them since them, trying to organise with folders.

Note that on the above examples, to keep things simple, no new photographs have been added.

LrC, with collections (and other methods- like keywords) separates the storage of the photos from the organisation of the photos: A collection is a way to group within Lrc any number of pictures together. A photo that is stored in one folder only, can appear in multiple collections. A collection can have grouped together photos that may be stored in different folders. If you remove a photo from a collection, it doesn't affect any other collections that it may be a member of. Only if you delete the photo from the Folder (or the All Photographs special collection) it will get removed from all the collections it appears. But the photo that you see in both the Collection Kathleen and the Collection Birthdays is the same photo: If you convert it to B+W in one, you will see it the same way in the other.

So collections give you more flexibility than folders: you can group the same or different photos in any collection you want, that is: you can put them in multiple Categories - not just one hierarchy of folders. You can organise your collections hierarchically, putting them in Collection Sets. It's very easy to duplicate a collection by right clicking on it and selecting Duplicate Collection. Then add or remove some photos into it or place it somewhere else.
If you have already some photos selected on the grid just press Cmd+N to put them in a new collection, without having to drag them with your mouse.

One thing that is different from folders: when you drag photos from one folder to another, LrC always moves (physically) the photos from folderA to folderB; But when you drag between collections LrC "copies " also shows the photos from collectionA inside collectionB - they don't get removed from collectionA.

As all the collection organisation is stored inside your LrC catalog it is essential to do regular (daily) backups of your Catalog, which is mush easier to do than backing up again a changed folder organisation.

There are better ways to organise your photos than collections, that is by tagging them with keywords and other metadata and searching them with the Library filter and/or Smart Collections.
 
I don't think that will work. AFAIK, you only get to see the 'Hide This Parent' menu on a top folder.
You are correct. You have to do "Hide this parent" with each folder from the to down to this folder "Shared Pictures"
 
Along the way, someone said that it is better to do my editing in 'Collections' rather than in 'Folders'. What is the reason for this? I used to use Collections, but it is so slow when I rename the individual 'collections' names! The 'beachball' spins forever each time I make a change! In 'Folders', there is no delay at all.
It was probably me that made that recommendation. An image can exist in one and only one folder in the file system. You can assign the same image to many collection and that all reference back to the same image in the same folder. Renaming Collection should be faster since it is a simple database entry in the catalog file. Renaming a folder in Lightroom should be slower since it involves interacting with the file system (changing the name there) and then updating the database entry in the catalog file.

Here's a tip for keeping track of your unprocessed files. Use Smart collections. Lets say that you want to assign a red label to images that you have COMPLETED" processing. Create a smart collection with the criteria: {Label Color}{is not}{red}. That smart collection will contain all of the images that do not have a red label. You can proceed through that Smart collection one image at a time and when you have completed processing, Assign a red label the image. It is ten automatically removed from that Smart Collection. When the Smart Collection is empty, you are done.

The Smart Collection can have multiple criteria:
{Label Color}{is not}{red}​
{Collection}{contains all}{My (static) Collection Name}​
You can create a static collection that you assign images to. The number of image is in this collection never changes unless you manually add or remove an image.
Your Smart collection with the above criteria contains initially the same images (that don't have a red label of course) And the images in this smart collection decreases as you assign a red label.
 
Last edited:
OK...thanks for the explanation on editing in Collections rather than Folders. I agree with the logic and am convinced...EXCEPT...
(Cletus helped me with this self inflicted problem): I had used asterisks in a ton of folders and got bitten big time when I upgraded to Monterey and the latest version of Lightroom. Every folder that had an asterisk in its title got 'lost' AND had its name changed from "Kathleen's Birthday" to "KLDM4~Q". It was a mess and took days to finally fix. Luckily, the Collections that had asterisks in their titles were fine (no Collections lost and no images lost). However, when I went from collection to collection and purged all the asterisks from them, the beachball would spin after each operation, for a long time! I estimate that it should have taken less than an hour to delete the asterisks, but instead it took about 4 hours! I used to use Collections but stopped several years ago because it was so slow.

So, bottom line, is it probable that I have some sort of corruption or other problem that is causing Collections to be so slow?

Thanks,
Kathleen
 
However, when I went from collection to collection and purged all the asterisks from them, the beachball would spin after each operation, for a long time! I estimate that it should have taken less than an hour to delete the asterisks, but instead it took about 4 hours!

Asterisks can cause trouble in software, so definitely best avoided. When you'd finished renaming the collections and then (hopefully) optimized the catalog, did it continue to run slowly?
 
I do back up my catalog each time I exit and I have 'test integrity' and 'optimize catalog' checked. I've had these three commands checked from the time I began using Lightroom.
I discontinued the use of Collections a few years ago due to the wait time after each task I performed. I didn't realize that this was unusual. I just thought it was the nature of Collections.
 
Yeah, you definitely shouldn't see any more lags with collections than you do with folders, should you decide to use them again.
 
Thanks for your reply, and here's the latest information: I decided to go into Collections this morning and check to see if there was any difference in speed. I discovered that I had missed about 160 files that still had asterisks in their titles, so as I renamed each file one by one, purging the asterisks. I timed the delay that occurs on each and every file renaming. The beachball spins for about 8 seconds each time. So doing the math, that comes out to a total of approximately 21 minutes of waiting and watching the beachball as I renamed the ~160 files.
Granted, it was an unusually long and hopefully never-to-be repeated operation, but it illustrates what I have experienced in the past when performing ordinary renaming and organizing operations in Collections.
Do you think this is unusual or is this normal when using Collections? As I said earlier, I switched to editing in Folders because there is no delay when performing the same tasks.

Thanks,
Kathleen
 
Renaming a collection is instantaneous for me on Windows. If you rename a collection who's name does not contain an asterisk, do you still see an 8-second pause?
 
I would suggest to create a separate, test catalog, import a number of photos into it and see how creating and renaming Collections and Collections Sets in this catalog behaves in your system.

If there are delays also there, then it’s not a matter of your main catalog being un-optimized or corrupted. The problem may be with your Mac setup. A backup of your data, formatting and reinstalling macOS and all your apps (including LrC) from scratch may be a solution. In that case do not use the Migration Assistant, as it may re-introduce the problems.

If, on the other hand, the test catalog runs OK, you might try to export everything from your current catalog to a new one, by using the Export as a Catalog command. Select and put everything in a Collection, right click on it and choose Export this Collection as a Lr Catalog. Do not check to include the Negative files, so that the new catalog refers to the photos in their original folders and your files are not copied to a new location. You can also omit the previews. Sometimes this procedure corrects catalog related problems. Open the new catalog and see if there is an improvement. If all is OK, you can use this new catalog instead of the old one. You should then select everything, and create fresh Previews for all your pictures, from the command in the Library menu.
 
I must humbly confess that the simple operation of shutting Lightroom down last night, and reopening it this morning seems to have cured the problem. Sometime in the middle of the night this possible solution occurred to me and, sure enough, this morning when I opened Lightroom and went into Collections and performed a few 'renaming' tasks, the operation was instantaneous! I renamed several files with no problems or delays.
I thank all of you who shared suggestions and detailed directions for possible solutions to the problem! As I told Cletus in an earlier post, all of your are such a valuable resource for those of us who struggle with technology!
That asterisk caused so many problems! I guess finally getting it out of the data base made Lightroom happy and willing to cooperate once again!
I'll do some more experimenting with Collections and make sure it is working. I'm going to be transferring to a new computer in the next few days and may have some questions, but I'll start a new thread if I do.
Once again, Thank you, thank you, thank you, ALL!
Kathleen
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top