Organising folders in LR

ShawWellPete

ShawWellPete

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Name
Pete
Edit My Images
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Hello all,

I'm running LR 2.3 on a Macbook Pro.

I have a rather jumbled folder structure, recently I have been importing new images and storing them, for example in a folder like...

/photos/2009/February/02/

This is great, unfortunately I have thousands of photos going back to 2000 all keyworded and a lot of the old ones are in a single directory for the date such as

/photos/2000-03-01/

Is there an easy way to restructure all my photos so they are like the first structure? I would of course like to maintain any keyworks and Lightroom developments.

Thank you!


:)
 
Go to thumbnail view in library.

Create a new folder at the right place in the hierarchy (eg, photo\2003\March\01)
Select the root level in the folders panel (so you get all your photos)
At the top click on Metadata
In the columns click to expand the tree down to day level.
Click on a day and all photos for that day will be listed.
Edit > Select all (or ctrl-a)
Click & drag the photos to the right folder in the folder list.
Rinse, repeat for each month.
 
Thanks pxl8, I think that would work but it would mean repeating the drag and drop for every day wouldn't it? That means manually dragging hundreds of folders. Is there an easier way?
 
I'm in the same boat as you, think I just need to get on and do it :(
 
Tell me about smart collections then! ;)
 
Hi Janice - this tutorial explains it much better than I can - it is about half an hour long and the smart collections section is near the end but probably worth watching/listening to all the way through.

I now have smart collections for various subjects including most bird species - it picks them up and puts them in a virtual collection as soon as I keyword a new image with the specified words. It will not accept, for instance, Blue Tit, as one word, you have to put it in as Blue AND Tit (and it is also useful to add bird)
 
ShawWellPete said:
Thanks pxl8, I think that would work but it would mean repeating the drag and drop for every day wouldn't it? That means manually dragging hundreds of folders. Is there an easier way?
Click to expand...

Possibly by scripting it but the time to learn the api would probably be longer than dragging and dropping the files for each day. You're probably looking at a couple of hours work, a drop in the ocean compared to when I have to tag and identify 2000+ images of runners from 10k or 1/2 marathon :LOL:
 
Hmm... there might be a quick way to do this....

Hmm... I was hoping a new smart collection would save a prefs file I could look at and hack about. There's some presets but they don't reveal much - the idea was to use excel to auto generate a smart collection template for each day. It still wouldn't move the files though, drag and drop is the only way to do that.

You could generate XMP files for everything, re-import the files and sort them by date at that point. The XMP files would preserve most of the data, not sure if history would be intact though.
 
pxl8 said:
You could generate XMP files for everything, re-import the files and sort them by date at that point. The XMP files would preserve most of the data, not sure if history would be intact though.
Click to expand...

Funny you should mention that, this is the conclusion I have come to. It would mean losing all histories and collections, but I guess I could make the collections into keywords first.

Annoyingly my HD has failed today, see here, so it'll have to wait until next week.

Thanks for the advice pxl8, much appreciated.
 
pxl8 - have to say that you really go out of your way to help people on here, and personally I think this is admirable. I always watch out for your replies to posts as I learn so much from reading through them.

You're a gentleman...
 
How about this, which works for me, and doesn't need too much effort.

1. Export the images you have in the old folder structure into a catalog

2. Delete them from lightroom (scary moment, but you can leave them on the HDD until you're sure the next bit has worked)

3. Reimport Catalog, and select the option that copies the files into the new older structure.

4. Bask in your own glory ;)

I used this method to migrate to a different machine and re-organise at the same time. It retains all the settings, tags, flags keywords etc, even virtual copies (I was so chuffed when I discovered this feature!) and all you need is the patience to let the export then imports run.
 
theMusicMan said:
pxl8 - have to say that you really go out of your way to help people on here, and personally I think this is admirable. I always watch out for your replies to posts as I learn so much from reading through them.

You're a gentleman...
Click to expand...
#

I agree. You have always take lots of time to help me with calibration, printer type questions and I have much appreciated it.
Thank you.
 
JasonRS said:
How about this, which works for me, and doesn't need too much effort.

1. Export the images you have in the old folder structure into a catalog

2. Delete them from lightroom (scary moment, but you can leave them on the HDD until you're sure the next bit has worked)

3. Reimport Catalog, and select the option that copies the files into the new older structure.

4. Bask in your own glory ;)

I used this method to migrate to a different machine and re-organise at the same time. It retains all the settings, tags, flags keywords etc, even virtual copies (I was so chuffed when I discovered this feature!) and all you need is the patience to let the export then imports run.
Click to expand...

I think the key for that method is to have the write to XMP box ticked! Moving all of my images up to 2008 then going to bed!
 
Thanks for the kind words guys, TP's a great place to be so I'm only too happy to do my bit to help out when I can.

Pete, I'm still looking at a way to get some kind of auto script for Smart Collections, the docs for the API must be online somewhere so with a bit of luck once you get your drive sorted (bummer about that btw) I might have an answer (y)
 
Ok, just to update this... LR does have a way to output the smart collection as source code which makes building one per day a trivial task.

PM when you get your HD sorted and I'll post up a walk through on how to do it (y)
 
JasonRS said:
How about this, which works for me, and doesn't need too much effort.

1. Export the images you have in the old folder structure into a catalog

2. Delete them from lightroom (scary moment, but you can leave them on the HDD until you're sure the next bit has worked)

3. Reimport Catalog, and select the option that copies the files into the new older structure.

4. Bask in your own glory ;)

I used this method to migrate to a different machine and re-organise at the same time. It retains all the settings, tags, flags keywords etc, even virtual copies (I was so chuffed when I discovered this feature!) and all you need is the patience to let the export then imports run.
Click to expand...

Hi guys, I've been trying to do this with a new HD (a temporary smaller one as I didn't have the patience to wait for the other replacement to arrive.

I must have done something wrong as the catalogue was all imported in exactly the same structure as the catalogue that was exported.

It looks like this is probably the bit that I got wrong

I think the key for that method is to have the write to XMP box ticked!
Click to expand...

Where is that tick box? it is not in the export catalogue dialogue box.

PXL8, thank you very much for the offer, whilst I have a few catalogues I don't really use many of them and they will be very easy to recreate from keywords.
 
To create the XMP files you need to

Select "All Photographs" in the Catalog panel (left hand side of library, near the top).
Edit > Select All to highlight them all.
Metadata > Save Metadata to a file

LR will then create xmp files for all the images, it could take a while - time for a cuppa.

When you import the catalog you need to set the option to import to new folders rather than their current location, then you can set up the folder tree for the files based on year, date, month as you like.
 
I was being daft (not for the first time) and importing the catalogue rather than importing the photos. Anyway I have opened the catalogue that I exported and am now writing the xmp files (CMD S shortcut if anybody else is trying to do this). I will then import the photos rather than the catalogue and I'm sure that will work.

Thanks again for you help. (y)
 
You can do either but importing the catalog will preserve history, virtual copies, etc. The new file structure comes from the fact that you tell it to move the files to a new location which is what you need to get the hierarchy (y)
 
:thinking:

I'm really confused now. When I import a catalogue, even if I move the files to a new location, it maintains the same file structure. It is only when I import photos that I get asked what file structure I would like.

Am I doing something daft again? :geek:
 
No, I've just tried and the import from catalog preserves the existing file structure, you can put photos that are new to the catalog in a specified folder but you can't change the structure.

So the only options are:

Use the filters and drag & drop as I originally suggested
Import the images (with XMP) to a new catalog and specify the correct file structure

Option 1 will take a while to drag and drop but will preserve all the history, etc.
Option 2 is quicker but will lose some data.

or Option 3, live with what you've got. I could still do the smart collection thing but it would require a collection for every day of the year even if there were no photos on that date - 3 years of photos means 1000+ collections, not very workable :(
 
Well I'm all backed up as of yesterday so I'm going to try option 2 and see how much I miss the data that I lose. When the new hard drive arrives I can either restore the original catalogue or the new one.

Isn't it funny how once you decide to do something it bugs you until you get it sorted? The truth is that I have hardly ever used the folder browser in LR anyway, probably because of the fact that it was a it jumbled, and I have managed fine!

Anyway, thanks pxl8 and others for your advice.
 
I have gone with Option 2, in case anybody else is looking to do this I should warn you that I also lost virtual copies as well as histories. The virtual copies I am far more bother ed about than the histories. O wonder if there is a way to recover them?

I may be able to open up the old database and export only the virtual copies as a catalogue and then re-import them...
 
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