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Inspiring
Apr 19, 2012 4:11 AM UTC
Released

P: Creating Directories in Inappropriate Locations ~/Documents

Adobe Lightroom 4 is annoyingly creating a directory in ~/Documents on Mac OS X. For example: /Users/smith/Documents/Adobe. Contained within this Adobe directory is an empty directory named "dynamiclinkmediaserver". This is an inappropriate place to create files or directories of this nature. OS X has other directories that can and should be used for settings, preferences, temporary files, and others of similar nature.These two directories are created every time that Lightroom 4 is launched, even after deletion. Please avoid creating these directories in ~/Documents and put them somewhere else in future patches and versions of Lightroom. I look forward to this annoyance being squashed. Thanks, and keep up the good work otherwise.

49 replies

Inspiring
Dec 16, 2020 12:26 AM UTC

On macOS Lightroom Classic creates folder in user’s Documents area. 

From Apple guidelines:

It is important to remember that the user domain (/Users) is intended for files created by the user. With the exception of the ~/Library directory, your application should never install files into the user’s home directory. In particular, you should never install files into a user’s Documents directory or into the /Users/Shared directory. These directories should only be modified by the user.

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Inspiring
Apr 26, 2020 12:49 AM UTC
I just wanted to echo the inappropriateness of Adobe creating a folder under My Documents. Please fix this, Adobe.

Alternatively, please provide an option to disable the dynamiclinkmediaserver, which appears to be the source of this directory.
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Inspiring
Dec 27, 2019 7:21 AM UTC


Every time I open Lightroom Classic CC, it creates the folders "Adobe" and "LrClassicLogs" in my documents folder.
I understand that these folders are necessary, but they should NOT be in this place, as my documents folder is for my own documents only, not for other software cache, which has many other places dedicated for it in other places on my system.

I cannot delete these folders, nor can I change any settings for where these folders are saved by default.

Please can this be fixed and/or solved, I am not the first to have this same problem.
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DESIGNmule
Participating Frequently
Dec 26, 2019 1:39 PM UTC
Hi there, Can you please update this chat on what the engineers have learned about this issue? Thanks!
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DESIGNmule
Participating Frequently
Dec 19, 2019 8:05 PM UTC
I finally found this thread as this has been happening to me since the new Photoshop update about three weeks ago. Im am hunting for answers at this point and I can't believe that this has been going on for 8 years. Now that it is affecting their more popular programs (like Photoshop), maybe finally this problem will be fixed.
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Inspiring
Jul 8, 2019 2:12 PM UTC
7 years later and this junk still appears in the Documents folder. This is for MY files, not Adobe's. Super sloppy. 
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kittysimages
Participating Frequently
Apr 25, 2017 4:03 AM UTC


Adobe CC 2015.9 version has created a folder inside my Documents folder called Adobe/Dynamiclinkmediaserver. This is my personal Docs folder and no software should create anything in there.

The odd thing is, in 2014 i installed lightroom for the first time and it created that folder with a folder inside called 7.0 and only when i updated my LR CC 2015 from .7 to .9 was a folder created inside of that dynamiclinkcmediaserver folder (called 10). So it had been gone (i can open lr5 without the folder being recreated), nothting was created when i installed lr CC 2015 and only with a version after 2015.7 (never been on .8) did it make it again. Why? and how can i get rid of it? Or have Adobe create it elsewehere
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wtremmel1966
Inspiring
Jan 16, 2017 6:56 AM UTC
Well - it *is* a bug. 
  • on a Mac, rename your Documents folder into something else
  • create an empty file named Documents (on the commandline you can do that with "touch Documents"
  • now Lightroom no longer starts. Bug. Bad one.
Very sloppy programming!

Now - do I get some months free on my subscription for finding this? Any other goodies will also be appreciated...

best regards
Wolfgang
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Inspiring
Jan 10, 2017 11:05 PM UTC
Awesome,
Thanks a lot.
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Legend
Jan 10, 2017 11:02 PM UTC
I've asked out engineers to look into this issue. Thanks.
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