Lightroom: Ability to search for Folder Names in Library Module

I am relatively new to Lightroom, but am also flabbergasted that there is no straightforward way to search for a folder name.  That is the principal way I narrow down my search.  I have thousands of photos in many, many folders.  Even before I started thinking seriously about how to organize photos and even knew the word "metadata," I would name a folder something related to its contents.  Being able to search for that name greatly speeds up my ability to find that folder and those photographs.  Sometimes, through laziness or lack of time, each photo is not keyworded, so the folder name is the only way to go.  

For instance, suppose I know I took a vacation to Paris several years ago, but can't recall what year, and do not want to scroll through hundreds of folder names.  Simply type "paris" in a folder search box and, boom, there the folder is.  

Apple's former Aperture did this search quite well, and it is possible in Bridge and Finder.  Since I would like to use Lightroom to keep track of all of my photos, this seems like a no-brainer.  

Often you are presented with a large list of folders and you want to narrow it down based on a search for names of the folders.

Could you please add a search box above the folders that let you quickly filter the list?

"Right to assume you know this basic stuff?"

Such condescension is misplaced because there are pragmatic reasons to use folder names. Some of us like to manage things using folder names so that we can search in explorer / finder etc ...

Three years later there is still no find folder / goto folder in Lightroom. This is a trivial feature to implement, yet the developers ignore basic pragmatism, as you suggest at the end of your comment. Lightroom is the worse for it.

See the Any Source plugin -- it lets you search folders by name.

I've been looking for a folder search tool for a while. Seems absolutely archaic that Adobe doesn't provide this. I switched over form Aperture. Apple has a nice folder search feature in Aperture. Big miss for Adobe on this one.

To clarify, different people mean different things when they talk about searching folder names:

1. The ability to search for photos contained in folders whose names match specific criteria. Smart collections provide this, built-in to LR.

2. The ability to filter the hierarchical list of folders in the Folders panel in the left-hand column of Library, just like you can do in the Collections and Keyword List panels. Unfortunately, this is not built-in to LR. However, the Any Source plugin provides that capability (among many others).

It's curious that LR 5 added the ability for collections but not folders or publish collections.

I would like to bring this up again. I feel it is a very basic thing that is missing from Lightroom. Yes there are workarounds, but hey, LR is a database, and you can search for anything except folder names. That feels like an strange exclusion to me.

I understand you want native folder-filtering functionality, and you'd probably prefer not to use a plugin for it...

That said, AnySource provides the equivalent functionality, and is worth a look, in my opinion.

Also TextMeta provides folder-path (and folder names) metadata which you can use in lib filters and smart collections. It allows you to filter photos based on the folder they're in, if you really want to select corresponding folders (instead of just having the photos they contain in the filmstrip), then FolderFigure supports doing that.

Again, I acknowledge such plugin workarounds would not be your first choice - still: may be better than nothing.

I want something like the "filter keywords" at the top of the keyword list, for both folders *and collections*. I have tons of collections and scrolling through takes a long time

You might be interested in trying my Any Source plugin, which provides fast, incremental search of folders and collections. Not quite as convenient as having it builtin to LR, but I think it gets close.