Inspiring

P: (Windows) Panel is limited to 1600 items (folders, keywords, etc)

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
November 15, 2011
25 replies
14781 views

Lightroom bug - hit a folder limit and unable to select the newly imported folder.452497 photographs across many drives in one catalog.The S drive has 214341 photos. It's the largest drive and so had many more folders than the previous drives.S:\Master Photos\ contains ~1633 folders. I know that's a lot but that is how her filing system was started. Those are the sequential numbers from 2220 - 3853 but there may be a sub folder or two or deleted folder in there so that's why the number is ~ approximate.Folders are labeled "sequential number"-"date" so 3853-20150316Adding one more folder caused Lightroom 4 to not allow the last folder to be clicked on and not show any images. The T:\ drive (offline, collapsed and below the S:\ drive) was collapsed and the label was overlaid on top of the "Collections" section label. Updated to latest version of Lightroom 5 via her new cloud account, had it rebuild the catalog and the same problem occurred.Created a sub folder S:\Master Photos\2012 and moved 15 of the folders into that folder. The 2012 folder was expanded so the list was actually one row larger and the last good folder wouldn't open. I collapsed the 2012 folder and now all the bottom folders were accessible.It appears there is an object limitation or a fixed array or something that is causing the folder list to become finite. She said a similar thing happens on her keyword list until she collapses some of the groups but I didn't check that out.

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brianp49895668

Inspiring

An absolute disgrace that this issue caused by sloppy programming is still ongoing after 15 years.

johnrellis

Legend

It's a bug in LR on Windows caused by a shortcut developers took in LR 1. See here for an authoritative description:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/p-windows-panel-is-limited-to-1600-items-folders-keywords-etc/idc-p/12893318#M49649

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brianp49895668

Inspiring

I have a problem in that the keyword list can't be scrolled all the way down. It stops about 1/2 way. I notice that people have been reporting a similar issue on here since 2012 and all that adobe seems to have done is to offer advice to create a heirarcial structure to shorten the list. There seems to be a difference of opinion as to if its an Adobe Issue or Microsoft issue with Mac users not having the sane issue. Have Adobe really sat on their backsides since 2012 and not fixed this fundamental issue? Is there a fix that I've missed? Creating a heirarcial structure is not going to work for me. IS there no way for example to just list keywords beginning with a certain letter - that would help. This is very frustrating.
Lightroom Classic 13.2.1 on Windows 11 23h2

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

This is a known limitation in Windows. It cannot list more than a certain number of lines (no idea how many). Use hierarchical keywords, so you can 'collapse' groups of keywords and limit the number of lines this way. You can also search on keywords.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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Thor Egil Leirtrø

Known Participant

The limit for a listbox in Windows seems to be about 65536 lines (64K). I doubt that is the reason for the problem with the keyword list.

Thor Egil LeirtrøFreelance concert photographer - thoregilphoto.com

Paulou12

Known Participant

Hi, I'm having issues dragging and droping keyword list into another keyword list for hierachy purposes. For some it works and for some it doesn't??? I'm using the latest version of LRC 12.2 on a Window 11. The way i'm doing it, i'm clicking on a keyword list, hold it , and try to drag it.

Thanks in advance for your replies!

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dj_paige

Legend

No problem here. Please provide a lot more details, exactly what are you doing, tell us step-by-step. Do you see a red circle with a slash through it? Also please provide the following basic information:

Paulou12

Known Participant

I'm adding my system info, if that can help!

Paulou12

Known Participant

Hi Wonder if someone could help understant and rectify this. My LRC keyword list stops to the letter N, instead of showing me from A to Z. Eventhough I have picture which I can see have keywords such as Television, sunset, etc, the list stops to N.

Thoughts???

Thanks,

Paul

Ian Lyons

Community Expert

See https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/keyword-list-1600-word-limit.42860/ Windows limits the number of entries in a list to 1600.

Ian Lyons

Community Expert

The same limiation also applies to folders, etc More details can be found at https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/p-windows-panel-is-limited-to-1600-items-folders-keywords-etc/idc-p/12667790

Note that the thread includes posts from 2015 through 2022

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mastix

Inspiring

This is a totally flawed component of Lightroom . It does not work correctly. Once you have many keywords, the program collapses. You cannot add anymore without seeing them. Trying to make a hierarchy might seem as a good solution, but it makes things worse, as then you have to deal with duplicate keywords in and out of the hierarchies. The List also becomes totally unresponsive once you have many keywords . You are not more allowed to drag and drop one or many keywords to a top hierarchy keyword if you have too many on the list and go to the lasts ones (something about a windows limit).

You can solve this creating "artificial" hierarchies like alphabet letters. But that brings a number of new problems. When you keyword and image. I use a Lightroom keyword plugin all those new keywords get saved outside the hierarchy. But you don't want to have them that way as if the lists becomes to long it will hit again the unresponsive problem because too many keywords. But now you have sometimes the same keyword inside and outside the hierarchy (if it is a new keyword no problem, but if it is one you have used before and put inside the letter you are on a road for headaches).

You cannot simply select a group of all letters with A now and throw them inside the A hierarchy because once Lightroom detects one of those duplicated you can not throw them all inside.

So now you have to go one by one and leave the duplicated one for later to deal with. Once you have done this (labor and time consuming) you now have to search for every duplicate one that is left out select the images , throw those images inside the duplicated keyword inside the hierarchy and delete the one outside the hierarchy ( DO NOT delete before you assign them to the one inside the hierarchy or those keywords will be deleted for those files).

All this could have been fixed by Adobe just letting us merge duplicate keywords or give us a click option do NOT create duplicate keywords and assign them wherever they where created first.

For me, this is by far the WORST implementation in Lightroom classic, and it gets not fixed over the years. Adobe is just not listening to customers here.

In my case, I don't recommend to anyone Lightroom as a Dam solution. For developing and retouching, yes. For classifying photos there are at the moment much better , advanced and above all responsive solutions.

FrostyOfTheNorth

Known Participant

I had to add a year-based parent folder to solve the problem. It was a painful and otherwise unnecessary process. I wish Adobe would have addressed these issues instead. I don't know if they have since I posted about about.

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FeedbackCommunityMemberAuthor

Inspiring

I am another user who has hit this limit within the past few months, and only just been made aware of the underlying cause. It seems to me that reaching ~1500 folders in a single parent folder is very likely, given that one of the import options is "organize by date" with a date based folder naming convention. In my case this was after around 8 years, with around 1600 automatically named import folders (\pictures\import\yyyy-mm-dd). Of course it's possible to work around the problem by rearranging the folder hierarchy so that import folders are (for example) in a year based parent folder, but that's a manual process, not a standard import naming convention.

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Renee48

Participant

Is there a limit on the number of keywords allowed? In Library mode I cannot scroll down to the end of the alphabet.

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Jim-Cincinnati

Participant

I am not able to scroll to the bottom of my metadata label list. I scroll about halfway down the list and am not able to scroll any further - the scroll bar at the right-hand side of the window is at the bottom of the window even though I'm only partway through the list. I suspect there is a problem with the large number of labels I have. My library has 47,000 photos and 2,800 unique metadata labels. Is there a fix so that I can scroll through all my labels?

Lightroom Classic version 11.4

Windows 10 Home version 21H2

Todd Shaner

Legend

I may have more collections than most people, but specifically then a good search facility is essential.

How many collections do you have?

Can you be more specific about "searching through my collections with the filter bar" as I am not aware that the filter bar can search for collections.

DJ see below screenshot.

johnrellis

Legend

You could be close to the maximum. The experience with keywords is that the behavior gets flaky and unreliable "near" the maximum. If you doubled the number of folders, you'd always encounter the problem.

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