LIGHToperatingROOMsystem—Part 3

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Oct 142010
 

In LIGHToperatingROOMsystem—Part 1 we looked at relocating missing files. Missing folder were covered in LIGHToperatingROOMsystem—Part 2. Now let’s take a look at some additional techniques to use in the Folders section of the Library module.

Nearly anything we can do in the operating system with files and folders can be done inside of Lightroom. Gaining a proficiency with the Folders section will assist you in avoiding quite a few file/folder headaches in your workflow. Lightroom and your operating system are intertwined. What you do in one will impact the other.

It is important to remember that Lightroom approaches your file system in a much different way than your operating system. Lightroom is only concerned with where the files for your images are located. Your operating system, on the other hand, must concern itself with the location of every file and folder. That lets you show as much or as little of the folder hierarchy as you like to see.

In our continuing example, suppose that we don’t want to see Group 1′s containing folder, Parent Folder. Easy! Right-click on Parent Folder and choose Promote Subfolders.

Remember that this is a database function and not a file system function. What that means is that when we promote subfolders in Lightroom it merely removes the containing folder from the Folders section hierarchy. Nothing happens in the operating system. The containing folder remains intact. This is for your organizational benefit.

After you choose to promote subfolders you are presented with the following warning dialog.

If you click on Promote Subfolders then Parent Folder will disappear from the hierarchy and Group 1 will be left. But now let’s pay attention to the section of the warning I highlighted. What does it mean?

If Parent Folder only contains other folders then there’s nothing to worry about. If, however, there are files in Parent Folder that are in your catalog and you promote the subfolders then those images will be removed from your catalog.

As I said previously, this is for your organizational benefit not your operating system’s. If we go ahead with the promotion you will see that the image leaves the catalog but the file remains in the OS.

OK. Let’s move on. Suppose you had to move your entire folder structure and all of its image files to another hard drive. Perhaps you had a drive failure or you are moving from an internal drive to an external one for portability reasons. Whatever the case, you used your OS and when you open your catalog everything appears to be gone!

You should know how to fix this now. Right click on the highest folder in the hierarchy and choose Find Missing Folder…

Locate the folder on the new drive and Lightroom will make everything right again! Now the new drive appears in the Folders section and all the missing file icons are gone.

This behavior is important to remember. Lightroom not only found the missing folder but it also traversed the folder structure and found everything else it contained. So, if you take care to put all your images in one folder hierarchy Lightroom can help you reconstruct the missing pieces.

Let’s go in the other direction now. What if we want to move folders from one drive to another in Lightroom? If nothing from the other drive is in your catalog then that drive will not appear in the Folders section. Here is one way to do this (and there are others, so experiment). Click the + next to Folders and choose Add Folder.

Select the drive. Click New Folder. In the popup enter a name and click Create.

You’ll be returned to the original dialog with the drive and new folder selected. Click Choose.

The new drive and folder now appear in the Folders section.

You can now drag the folder from the original drive and drop it on the new folder on the second drive.

You will be warned that this action will physically move files on the drive. Don’t worry too much about the undo warning. All that means is the the undo command in Lightroom won’t be available. You can undo this by moving things back to where they started.

Once you click Move and the operation is complete, the folders and files appear on the new drive in the Folders section.

Now if you don’t want to see the containing folder just promote the subfolders.

And the folder will disappear from site.

Just to reiterate, the original folder is still on the drive even though Lightroom no longer shows it.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this three part tour. Believe it or not, there are still some treasures to be gained in the Folders section. So set sail for the Library module and explore!

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About the Author:
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Gene is an Adobe Community Professional and and Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop, and InDesign, and an avid Lightroom fan. He belongs to the Professional Photographers of America (PPA) and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). Gene also the Co-Founder, Manager and a frequent blogger for the Dallas Fort Worth Adobe User Group (DFWAUG).

In addition to running Lightroom Secrets, Gene also contributes to O'Reilly's media blog, moderates on the Adobe forums, and helps out on lightroomforums.net.

  • Tdes64

    Another great article in the series – great job

  • http://lightroomsecrets.com Gene McCullagh

    Thanks Markus!

  • http://twitter.com/xlerate xlerate

    I don’t understand why Lightroom 3 cannot see sub-folders created on my disk outside of Lightroom.
    Example, I have a folder structure on my disk in explorer as follows: DIGI201010-2010PARTY-123SUBFOLDER

    Lightroom does not see the subfolder.
    I can even right click on PARTY-123 and say synchronize. It will even say ‘import new photos (55). I select synchronize and no subfolder appears in Lightroom.

    I don’t want to make folders in Lightroom, I want it to see the structure on my disk.

    Is this possible?
    It is driving me nuts!

  • http://lightroomsecrets.com Gene McCullagh

    Hi xlerate!This isn’t normal behavior. Check to make sure that there isn’t an expansion triangle to the left of PARTY-123. Normally, if SUBFOLDER has images and you synchronize PARTY-123 then SUBFOLDER’s image will import but you may not immediately see the folder in the FOLDER section. There will be an expansion triangle to the left of PART-123. Click that and then you should see SUBFOLDER below PARTY-123.Another way to see SUBFOLDER is to right click on one of the images you know came from SUBFOLDER. From the menu choose “Go to Folder in Library” and you’ll see SUBFOLDER in the FOLDERS section.

  • http://twitter.com/xlerate xlerate

    Gene,

    Thank you for your response.
    It is very strange, there is no expandable arrow next to this subfolder or several others that definitely have subfolders in explorer. Oddly enough, one does. But as for the others, they do not show up. Here is a screen shot displaying what I am seeing: http://goo.gl/0KfI

    As you can see in explorer, there is a subfolder named ‘send’ which I use to deposit photos I will send off to customers. However, on within Lightroom, it does not expand.

    As I said before, its extremely weird because when I right click on a folder with a subfolder and select ‘synchronize’ Lightroom shows that there are additional photos to be synced as seen here: http://goo.gl/KfNl … but then I get this window prompt: http://goo.gl/DEUj … in which the ‘import’ option is grayed out.

    I hate to sound desperate, it just seems like there is something I am missing or definitely broke.

    Thanks for any light you can shed on this.

  • http://lightroomsecrets.com Gene McCullagh

    Hmmm…

    I did some tests on this and found that if there are no images in the subfolder (“send” in your example) then that folder will not appear from a synchronization. If there is at least one image in the folder and you synchronize then that folder appears. The additional images listed on the dialog are all contained in the original folder and not in “send”.

    Now, if there are indeed images in “send” then you have a problem. I cannot reproduce that scenario. Double check that there are images in “send” and then synchronize the parent folder.

    You might also try expanding the import/synch dialog and see if that folder shows up as a potential source with or without images in it.

    Let me know what you find out.

  • http://twitter.com/xlerate xlerate

    Gene,

    Thank you for your help. It led me down the path and I was able to close in on the issue that may be of help to someone.
    Here is what I was doing….

    I wanted to send FOLDERDATEPARTYimage001.jpg to a customer, so I would make a subfolder called ‘send’. I copied image001.jpg into send. No rename. I did this for every photo that I wanted to send off. So therein, the subfolder of an event contained the identical file & filename as its top level folder. This behavior (I believe would not let Lightroom import the same file or even see the subfolder because of the same name.)

    I just now renamed images in subfolder to send00x.jpg, ran the synchronize and low and behold the items imported and the arrow next to the folder illuminated showing there existed a subfolder.

    In short, the same file name cannot exist in a subfolder.
    I should be color correcting the originals and let lightroom make its own subfolder with modified images, but I was preselecting images before processing, so I would not have to go through the entire set, but only the ones I deemed fit to be sent.

    I guess, you can always see if this behavior is reproducible by copying a few images into a newly made subfolder, but keep same name.

    I do appreciate your help.
    Thanks!

  • http://twitter.com/xlerate xlerate

    Gene,

    Thank you for your help. It led me down the path and I was able to close in on the issue that may be of help to someone.
    Here is what I was doing….

    I wanted to send FOLDERDATEPARTYimage001.jpg to a customer, so I would make a subfolder called ‘send’. I copied image001.jpg into send. No rename. I did this for every photo that I wanted to send off. So therein, the subfolder of an event contained the identical file & filename as its top level folder. This behavior (I believe would not let Lightroom import the same file or even see the subfolder because of the same name.)

    I just now renamed images in subfolder to send00x.jpg, ran the synchronize and low and behold the items imported and the arrow next to the folder illuminated showing there existed a subfolder.

    In short, the same file name cannot exist in a subfolder.
    I should be color correcting the originals and let lightroom make its own subfolder with modified images, but I was preselecting images before processing, so I would not have to go through the entire set, but only the ones I deemed fit to be sent.

    I guess, you can always see if this behavior is reproducible by copying a few images into a newly made subfolder, but keep same name.

    I do appreciate your help.
    Thanks!

  • http://lightroomsecrets.com Gene McCullagh

    Hey xlerate!

    Yes. That would explain a lot. Let me suggest an alternative workflow that could save you some time.

    Let’s say you have 50 images you shot for XYZ Corp. and you need to send them only 10 processed images. Make use of Collections and/or Smart Collections. When you import the original shoot Keyword them on the way in and include a client identifier. Something like clXYZCorp.

    After the import immediately create a collection for the client and add the images to it. If you shoot for that client regularly them create a Collection Set for them and in that create a collection for that shoot. So now you either have a collection called something like Client XYZ Corp or a collection set called Client XYZ Corp with a collection inside it called XYZ Fall Product Shoot. Now make a Smart Collection called XYZ Fall Selects and use a keyword like XYZFallSelect as the parameter.

    Now switch to the collection to restrict what you see to only those images. Go through them and make your selections. As you do tag the selected images with the keyword you used to create the smart collection (XYZFallSelect). As you do that those images are instantly included in your selects smart collection.

    Now you can switch to the smart collection to restrict what you see to your selected images. Process away. Then export to a folder of your choice to send to the client. There is no need to include the exports back in the catalog as you already have the processed images there.

    This is but one of many many workflow variations you can devise that will make you life easier inside LR.

    Remember Rule 5!

  • http://twitter.com/xlerate xlerate

    Gene, Thanks for the suggestion.
    I am reading everywhere about the huge benefits of smart collections.
    I will eventually tackle that, it is just now that seems like an additional learning process even before I start correcting.

  • Anonymous

    Thanks for the detailed article! Is there a way to remove the abandoned parent folder from the HD after the subfolders have been promoted? It’s confusing to have a bunch of unwanted parents or “Temp” folders on my LR Library Drives. Manually removing the folder from the drive even after it’s no longer visible in LR seems to mess with the LR database path structure for the subfolders, and they all have to be relocated.
    Thanks!
    EQ

  • http://lightroomsecrets.com Gene McCullagh

    Thanks EQ!

    You can hide the parent in the folders panel but, as I mentioned, that folder will still exist on the HD. Even though LR hides it it is still aware of it’s existence. So removing it from the drive via the OS will result in the problems you indicated.

    You could go one step further and show the parent of the temp folder. Once LR shows that folder you can drag the children of temp up a level. Then temp will be empty and can be deleted. LR will already have the new structure recorded so you will avoid the problem.

  • Anonymous

    Thanks, Gene!
    That’ll do it. Not exactly intuitive, but hey, whatever works!