Export/Sync Lightoom to Harddrive

 

I thought about synchronising to lightroom classic then seeing if that would work out of the box but I can't seem to find how to do that either as it only appears to  put them into Year then date folders instead of retaining the original Lightroom Folder-->Album heirarchy.

 

Does anybody know how I can achieve this without doing each one individually?

By @ShaunH

What you want to do in Lightroom cannot be done. The best that you can achieve is to export each album individually, having first created the physical "Folder" structure on the target drive, then exporting the album into that physical folder structure.

Regarding the use of Lightroom Classic, comparing the "Year then date folders" to the "Lightroom Folder-->Album hierarchy" is comparing apples with oranges, i.e. the two things are completely different. The equivalent in LrC to the "Folder 2023>Folder March>Album" structure in Lightroom would be Collection Set>Sub Collection Set>Collection. When you sync LrC with the cloud, all the existing Albums in Lightroom would appear as Collections (with the same name) in LrC, but the Folder>Sub Folder structure does NOT sync as Collection Set>Sub Collection Set. So you would then have to recreate that manually in LrC, then possibly the plug-in that @richardplondon mentions "may" be able to do what you want, but I'm not certain it will include the Collection Set>Sub Collection Set part in the export process.

You could consider making a feature request (idea) for this functionality to be added to Lightroom, but in order to support that idea you would really need to explain the use case for such a feature. I use Lightroom to store all my images in the cloud, and haven't yet come across a need to do what you are suggesting, but that doesn't mean it's not a valid request as we can all have different workflows.

If you can get your desired organisation of virtual albums (collections / collection sets, in Lightroom Classic parlance) showing inside Lightroom Classic, then regardless of what real folders (dated or otherwise) these images' source files may live inside - there is a plugin available from Jeffrey Friedl which can help do what you ask. 

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/collection-publisher

This makes use of LrC's "publish" feature but the practical result is the same as using Export. It automates the job. Also once you'd done it once, Publish can track further change and then on demand later update (re-export) only what is necessary externally, to maintain this mirroring of what is seen inside the Catalog. 

I have no experience of Lightroom non-classic - is there really no bulk export option that can include multiple albums? I have just seen report of so many subtle behaviour differences between that and Lr Classic (e.g. keyword handling), it may be preferable in those terms to export natively out of your primary library if possible.