mkirgan

Greetings friends! This is my first post on the forum and I am just starting to learn lightroom so I will first ask my question and then I will explain my setup, so you will hopefully not have to read more than necessary to suggest a solution.

Is there a way to ask lightroom to Physically move all of my files into a new file structure on the same drive, based on date taken with one subdirectory for each year, and a folder for each month below that.. without exporting and reimporting all of the photos?

I have one lightroom catalogue with 62,000 images on a macbook pro. My cataloque resides in my pictures folder on the laptop itself. All of the image files reside on an external USB 3 drive in a single folder organised into subfolders for each year only. I did this organization outside of lightroom initially.

I later learned that on import, I could have lightroom copy files into folders by month below the year subfolder, so I started doing that with the new imports. Now I only have the most recent imports in those folders, but I would like to go back and have the whole collection organized that way physically to simplify storage and backup and make it easy to use my photos outside of lightroom. I know I could probably create a new catalogue and reimport everything, but I am hoping that someone knows of a more efficient way to do it from withing lightroom. Thanks for any suggestions....

Michael

jethro779 Loc: Tucson, AZ

Have you done any editing in Lightroom to those files or are they just on the hard drive?

mkirgan

I have not yet done any editing in lightroom

jethro779 Loc: Tucson, AZ

Open Lightroom and click on file in the upper left corner. When it opens Click import photos & videos. when the next screen appears Click source on the left side panel. When you see your external drive click on it an go to your photo files & folders. pick out a small folder/file and click on it to highlight it. Top center the will be a dialog box asking if you want to import as dmg, jpg,tiff and I believe there will be one other file format. In that dox click on add. That will put the file in the catalog with out moving the photos. Next on the right side screen go to file handling and choose what file handling & apply during import settings you want & import and see if it appears in your catalog as you want it to.

mkirgan

Thanks so much for your suggestion! When I click import and select the drive where my photos are, any file or folder I select is greyed out and lightroom says that "this photo has already been imported" what I am trying to do is export or rather physically "move" the files that are already there, to a subfolder based on the year/month that it was taken. I have only been able to find a way to do this from lightroom on import, but was hoping to avoid reimporting 62,000 photos and rebuilding the previews etc. in a new cataloque while rewriting or copying files to a new location. I might be asking for something that can't be done, I'm not sure. I hope I'm explaining what I'm trying to do well enough. Thanks so much for your help!

jethro779 Loc: Tucson, AZ

Repost your question in the post processing forum and hope that Searcher sees it. He seems to be the Guru in all things Lightroom. Maybe one of the others will see it as well and have some constructive ideas.

mkirgan

Thanks I will try that. Thank you for taking the time help, I really appreciate it!

jethro779 Loc: Tucson, AZ

Sorry it didn't work out.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Searcher is offline, hopefully temporarily. He has health problems. He always answered questions on the Main board.

jethro779 Loc: Tucson, AZ

Hope he gets better soon.

tomcat

One thing you can do is to physically move on your external HD one of your already imported files into the newly created month subfolder. Then open LR and go to this original file and attempt to open one of the images. LR will send you a message that it can no longer find the image. You right click on the folder and now tell LR when to find the new set of images in that new monthly subfolder. This should then make those images available.

But, what I have done for a similar situation is to leave the photos alone, in their original location because LR knows where they are, even if you don't know or you don't like where they are. Then when you process them in LR (you earlier said to another poster that you have not processed them yet), export them to your new year/month subfolder structure system. Then you can search your new system for processed images and leave the originals alone (since you won't be printing/sharing the originals anyway,eh?)

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

The best way, according to Adobe, is to connect your external drive, create a top folder ( pics or whatever) then using the file stucture in Library under folder, drag the original folder (mine are dates) to the new location. LR will then tell you that it is moving the images. continue this and DO NOT CLOSE LR until it is finished moving the images... depending on the speed of your computer and the speed of the external drive, this may take awhile. There are several tutorials in youtube and Adobe on moving files.. Anthony Morganti has one video that is pretty good... just google "moving files in LR" or something.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

zigipha Loc: north nj

or create a new catalog "B" and import from existing folders to catalog "B" with copy option. These will be copied to new foldrs and keep the old ones intact. The delete the old ones. then merge catalogs

Redmark

Where is the post processing forum? excuse my ignorance.
Cheers