Subfolder madness, please help!

Forum|Forum|3 months ago
November 19, 2025
1 reply
67 views

Hello and thank you in advance.

I'm getting ready to move my Lightroom Classic catalog and images to a new computer.

Several years ago, My hard drive failed and, long story short, at the time I did not have time maching setup. I did have an online backup and also had the repair shop try to extract as much data from the drive as they could. The problem is that all the folders got messed up due to the issues, and, my negligence and general ingnorance of how folders worked within lightroom. I finally just finished reconnecting the photos that were "missing" in Lightroom, but the problem is the photos are scattered around in various places on the computer. I want to be able to clean this subfolder mess up and organize it the way it should be before I export to new computer. Any guidance of the best way forward would be appreciated. See attached image...

macOS

dj_paige

Legend

Please read https://www.lightroomqueen.com/moving-lightroom-free-ebook/

Please be sure to follow all the steps (unless they clearly don't apply to you such as moving Windows to Mac, or Mac to Windows) and don't skip any. Please do not make up any steps that are not clearly stated. If something isn't clear, stop and ask questions.

Confused in LRAuthor

Participant

Thank you so much for the reply, I'm going through the guide now. If I could ask- when the installation is complete on the new computer will I still have the big mess of folders that I have now, or will that be fixed, as I am going to have all the photos in one location on the new computer? I'm just wondering if I need to continue to try to move and eliminate these folders within Lightroom.

Thank you very much.

dj_paige

Legend

There's no requirement that you fix the "big mess of folders". If you move everything over to the new computer such that all of the folder hierarchy is unchanged, LrC should be fine. It's up to you whether you put in the time to re-arrange these folders into a single master folder or not; LrC will not re-arrange everything for you.

Whatever you do, DO NOT combine the two tasks of moving to a new computer and re-arrange the folders into a single task. If you choose to rearrange the folders, do that before you move to a new computer such that you can confirm all of your re-arranging still works in LrC. Or do it after you move to a new computer.

And if you don't have backups of the catalog file and all of your photos in their current messy state, you absolutely must create these backups before you do anything.

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