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Brighila3821007694nq
Known Participant
May 3, 2025
Question

Move Folders across drives without importing existing photos into Catalog

  • May 3, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 187 views

Hello everyone,

 

I`m trying to organize my Library inside my LR Catalog to look the same as the structure on my hard drives without having to import all my old existing photos again into LR Catalog (as they already exist into other app catalogs that I`ve used before LR).

So I have a structure on which I import my new photos, select and delete the unwanted ones and then edit and move them to my main folders into my library in which they stay:

   1. I first import them from my SD cards into an Unsorted folder located on my PC - here I do all the selection, delete the unselected, edit them.

   2. I then move the final images from the Unsorted folder (from my PC) to my final folders located on my NAS - there they remain.

I tried to find a way to move the photos from my PC to my NAS inside the LR Catalog folders structure but the problem is that if the destination folders on my NAS don`t appear here inside the LR Catalog, as they don`t have any photos imported into my LR Catalog yet, because they have been used inside my other app`s catalogs. So how do I show the folders structure on my NAS inside the LR Catalog without importing those older photos into LR Catalog (so just the folders), in order to be able to move the photos from Unsorted into their final path on my NAS?

 

Thank you in advance for your help!

Alex

2 replies

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 3, 2025

Move one photo manually, outside Lightroom Classic. Then start Lightroom Classic. Lightroom will show this photo as missing. Click on the missing photo exclamation mark, that will allow you to 'reconnect' this photo. After you have done that, the new folder will show in Lightroom Classic because it now contains one photo that is in the catalog.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
May 3, 2025

1. I first import them from my SD cards into an Unsorted folder located on my PC - here I do all the selection, delete the unselected, edit them.

2. I then move the final images from the Unsorted folder (from my PC) to my final folders located on my NAS - there they remain.

 

If you really have to move photos from an unsorted folder to many different specific folders, there is no easy way to do this.

 

You might as well do this outside of LrC using Windows Explorer and then import into LrC once they are in their desired folders on the NAS. Importing into LrC and then moving things to new folders on a new drive will be tedious and offer many opportunities for mistakes.

 

But, thinking out of the box, and coming up with a different and (IMHO) better solution, stop organizing by folders named for the contents of the photo. Use Keywords and other metadata to organize and find your photos. And then it doesn't really matter what folder the photos are in. And by using keywords and other metadata there is no need to move photos from here to there. Create folders by capture date at Import (this is a Lightroom Classic default).

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