In a previous post entitled How do I reorganize my Folders panel we discussed how to create, rename and delete folders, and how to move photos between folders. If you’re moving to a dated folder structure, Lightroom won’t create the folder structure automatically, but it can help. Here’s how:
- Create your new dated folder structure in the Folders panel. Month folders inside of year folders is usually plenty – creating day folders inside each month takes a long time with minimal benefit. (You could create these as you need them, if you prefer)
- Select All Photographs in the Catalog panel.
- At the top of the Grid, select the Metadata Filters (discussed in more detail in the Finding & Filtering Photos chapter starting on page 167 of my Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ book)
- In the Date column, highlight a single month of photos, hiding photos/videos shot at other times.
- Select all of the photos in the Grid below and drag them to their applicable month folder. Regardless of where they’re currently stored, they’ll all be moved to the new month folder.
- Repeat steps 4 and 5 until all of the photos are in the new dated folder structure.
- There may be many leftover empty folders in the Folders panel – these can now be deleted.
Hopefully, by the time you’ve finished all of the tidying up we’ve been doing in this series of blog posts you’ll have a wonderfully tidy catalog, and you can concentrate on actually working with your photos instead of managing them.
Related blog posts
Here’s a list of some related blog posts:
Where should you store your photos?
Why not organize photos into folders by topic?
How do I reorganize my folders panel?
How do I rearrange existing photos into a new dated folder structure? (this post)
For extensive information on Lightroom Classic, see Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ.
If you have the Photography Plan, then as well as Classic you have access to the Lightroom cloud ecosystem including the mobile apps and web interface. For more information on these apps, see Adobe Lightroom – Edit on the Go.
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We also have a special bundle offer for the two books. This includes Premium Membership for the first year as described above for the whole Lightroom family!
Originally posted 12 June 2016, updated October 2019.
I ended up removing the folder from my catalog and re-importing… seems more convenient ! losing all the faces tags, depends how many picture you have I guess..
You also lose edits, Collection memberships,… so although it works, you need to balance losing all your work for those photos.
If you use a dated folder structure, can you make Lightroom display the folders in reverse order on the left side panel? That is, I’d rather see 2020 at the top, with 2019 below, then 2018, 2017, etc…
No, they are ordered and displayed strictly alpha-numeric, A-Z
Thank you! After a lot of googling I gathered that. It’s ridiculous. So I decided to put some characters before the year, to make sure they get there with the more recent at the top.
Adobe always welcome feedback and feature requests, details here:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/send-bug-report-feature-request-adobe/
I suspected that. Thanks.
If one used the method mentioned in this post to move image files into a new year-month structure, how can one also move the Develop Side-Car Instruction files along with their related images?
Lightroom moves them at the same time (it knows they relate to the raw files you’re moving)
A helpful article. For re-arranging by date, I have used a workflow slightly modified by the order of steps-
1. Filter for photos by a date (YR/MO) and select all [Ctrl+A]
2. R-Click on a ‘Parent’ folder (eg. Pictures) and [Create a Folder in ‘Pictures’]
3. In the “Create folder…” dialog- Check the option [Include Selected Photos] and [Create]
This workflow automatically ‘moves’ the selected photos to the new dated folder being created, without requiring a Drag & Drop action.
It also avoids having pre-defined empty dated folders if there were no photos taken in one particular Month.
But it does mean having to R-Click the same ‘Parent’ folder to keep the new dated folders in correct placement.
Thanks for sharing Robert!
Hi. As a refugee from several other photo managment programs I found that my catalog had several places where I had duplicate raw and jpg files in the same directory. The big problem is that not all jpg’s are duplicates.
To help untangle the mess I setup a metadata filter using date and filetype similar to those discussed above and used select all in the filmstrip to highlight the CR2 files. Flipping the filter from CR2 to All made duplicate jpgs show in the filmstrip as non-highlighted photos. Then selecting and inverting the selection allowed me to identify the non-duplicate jpgs. (This sounds a lot harder than it really is!).
1. Setup the metadata filter. In my case the filetype filter gave me the choice of showing all types, jpgs or CR2 files.
2. Choose CR2 files in the filter
3. Select all of the photos in the filmstrip. These photos will all be the CR2s.
4. Go back to the metadata filter and choose all filetypes. You will now see a series of alternating highlighted/non-highlighted photos in the film strip. The highlighted ones are the CR2s and the non-highlighted ones are the jpgs.
5. You can scan through the filmstrip looking for two or more adjacent un-highlighted photos – those will be the jpgs that do not have a corresponding CR2.
6. Select the non-duplicate jpgs you want to save and switch the metadata filter to jpg.
7. Choose invert selection from the Edit menu. Now all of the duplicate jpgs will be highlighted (selected) and the non-duplicate jpgs will not be selected.
At this point you can move, remove or delete the highlighted duplicate jpgs without affecting the non-duplicate jpgs.
Hope this helps.
There is a way to LR do it automatically.
1. Select all photos in the catalogue and have LR generate XMP files by presssing S (or S on Mac)
2. create a new catalogue
3. Import all the photos in the new catalogue, using a rule to organize the files by date.
I use it often with people who want to reorganize their files by date and it works fine.
Oups, it didn’t like the greater and lower symbols…
On step 1, please read Ctl + S (or Cmd + S on MAC)
It works fine if they don’t mind losing a load of their work. Many things aren’t stored in XMP, including flags, virtual copies, Develop History, Develop panel switch positions, Collections, Publish Services, Books, Slideshows, Saved Prints, Web Galleries, and a bunch of bits I can’t think off the top of my head. That’s potentially quite a lot of work to lose, when there’s a relatively easy way of doing it and losing nothing.
You’re right Victoria. We need to be carefull about what might be lost by my method.
My method is more usefull for people new to Lightroom who want to reorganize their bunch photos with the date structure. There is a cullprit, however, when the names of the old folders describe the content (event, places, people, etc.) These infos are metadata that need to be introduced in LR.
Absolutely right Philippe, folder names are easily missed.
Thanks, if you can’t do it then I know to stop trying. I’ll look at the plug ins.
Steve
Is there a way in Lightroom to select photos within a folder that were taken in a certain month, regardless of the year?
I have a folder of photos taken in my garden. This contains sub folders with imports of photos on particular days. I would like to select all photos within these sub folders taken in, for instance, April spanning all the years. So photos taken in April 2017, April 2016, April 2015 and so on would all be selected. Even better would be a Smart Collection that selected these. I believe there is a third party plug in that could do this but it would good if Lightroom could do it.
Not without manually creating a bunch of complex smart collections using specific dates. There are a few plug-ins that can help – I think Any Filter, Data Explorer and Search Replace can all help with that. See John’s notes here for one option: http://www.beardsworth.co.uk/searchreplace129/
Is there a way to tell Lightroom to forget any folders that have 0 images in them, or do you need to remove them individually?
You have to remove them individually, but you can select multiple folders and hit the – minus to remove them all at once.
This has been a really great series of articles. I hope and am sure that the LR Mobile one will be as insightful and well explained.
Thank you Robert. I’m really enjoying sticking to a theme for a few weeks, rather than just doing random posts.
Great Tip!! Thanks!!