Alan321 Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Need assistance with Lightroom image import. please | |
Let's say you do the import > add thing so that the files physically stay where they were as they are imported. Once you finish the import Lr will display every relevant folder that contains one or more of your images, but it will not pad out the folder structure with the empty folders that might be linking some of your image-holding folders. Any parent folders and sub-folders will show as linked only if they both contain images that have been imported. The folder sequence may also look out of whack because sibling folders will not be grouped unless there is an image-holding parent folder.
The solution is to manually tell Lr to display enough of the folder structure so that your photo-holding folders appear to be in their right hierarchy. It's not hard when you know how What I'm about to write may well be as clear as mud at first but will look a lot clearer in a week or so after you have played with Lr a bit more.
Go to one of the seemingly orphaned folders in the Lr folder panel and right click on it and select the option to show its parent folder. The parent folder will appear and the folder you started with will be indented in the list to indicate that it is a sub-folder. You might initially think that some of your folders have gone at the click of a mouse button but don't panic because it's really just the folder list being rearranged to better match the proper structure. As each parent folder is added to the structure, Lr will make sure that all of its catalog folders that belong to that parent folder are grouped together. Folders that were initially far apart in the list are now adjacent to each other. Look carefully and you will find the folders that had seemed to vanish. Add another parent folder and the structure gains more of its actual shape. Add a parent of a parent and things look even better.
Avoid adding too many folder levels unnecessarily. You can go all the way up to whatever level of folder contains all of the image-holding folders below it, but if you go any further you will gain nothing and you will push the folder names that you want to see further to the right where you may not be able to see them; that folder panel is only so wide. There is no point trying to show the root folder of a drive if the images start 4 levels down.
You will also find that there is a folder hierarchy for each drive. In case you don't already know it, a single Lr catalog can span multiple drives. Doing so is generally better than using multiple catalogs.
tip: Try to get the folder structure right before you begin importing images into Lr, but you have imported them do not mess with the structure or the file locations except by using Lr. Otherwise the Lr catalog will lose track of the images and you'll have a real mess on your hands. In general, the deeper your structure is shorter the folder list will appear to be in the Lr folder panel, but the wider it will be. The shallower your structure is the more sibling folders will appear when you want to display a folder, and the longer your list will be.
Bonus tip: Make sure there is a parent folder at some level that it is not too far above the other image-holding folders. That folder is important because if and when you ever need to look at the images in a backup drive, Lr will say the files are all missing when you point to that drive. You have to find them all. If you can point your missing top-level folder to the equivalent one in the other drive then Lr will automatically find all of the files with no further effort from you. You may never appreciate this advantage but when things go wrong you will want the recovery process to be as simple as possible.
- Alan
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