help changing folder structure

[Guest]

i already asked this on reddit where i was recommended to ask this here with regards to John R. Ellis.

"i had all my photo folders (thousands) in a single folder:

2001-01-15

...

2023-01-15

unfortunately this makes accessing the folder list really slow and not even LR can scroll towards the bottom of them all (cannot scroll lower than 2018 in my case).

so i wanted to move them into a yearly subfolder. it works (with occasional "unknown error occured" messages) but takes hours! while in explorer it would be done in seconds.

so i moved them in explorer because this is ridiculous.

now apparently it's not possible to tell lightroom what the new folder structure is like and i have to start from scratch or relink every missing folder one by one?"

"synchronize folder" will delete and import ~70k files, while "find missing folder" has to be done manually with every missing folder?

[Rob_Cullen]

Do NOT Synchronize Folders! Do NOT Import any files.

I suggest, as long as you have not renamed folders,  use File Explorer to move all your folders back to how they were in a single parent folder. This will restore the Catalog links as a first step.

Then, within Lightroom-Classic-

1)  [Right-Click] on the 'Parent' folder of all your dated folders and [Create Folder inside XXXX...] eg. "2010"

2) In the Folder panel- Select all the folders that are 2010, and Drag and Drop them onto the new "2010" folder.

3) Repeat Steps 1) and 2) for each year.  2000,2001,2002,2003,,,etc.

So you will end up with a LrC folder structure like-

[Guest]

yes i started doing it this way. it was taking HOURS for moving a years worth of folders (while encountering multiple "unknown errors" and even a crash to Desktop), while it took mere seconds with explorer.

also i found these stories making me hesitant to trust lr processes:

Well, for as long as Lightroom has been around I've noticed too many users on various forums reporting that they've lost photos (sometimes entire folders or even their complete collection of photos) after using drag and drop within the application for moving files/folders. The problem usually manifests itself  if the application crashes or stops responding during such a Move operation because Lightroom automatically deletes folders/photos after completing the 'Move photos' operation. Unfortunately, the missing photos will not be in the trash, so your worst nightmare becomes a reality.

https://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

[F. McLion]

If you do it with explorer, then you have to manually relink each and every folder.

I'd really suggest proceeding as Rob suggested, in small batches, however.

[Guest]

ok but

isn't there a database file somewhere where one could search and replace the paths like:

/photos/2023-01-12

/photos/2023/2023-01-12

[F. McLion]

Sure, if you are a database and SQL expert. I'd strongly suggest to not work on the catalog directly. If you mess it up, then no one, specially not Adobe, will be here to help.

[Ian Lyons]

Given the folder/file structure you originally adopted, there is no quick or easy way of reorganising inside or outside of LrC. Also, as you've found, moving large numbers of folders/files within LrC is slow and prone to crashes. It's also likely that some of these crashes will result in data loss. If you want to avoid data loss whilst following the approach suggested by Rob, then I strongly recommend that you first make a copy of the entire original folder structure and files on separate disk using Explorer. Doing so will ensure that should a crash occur when reorganising the folders/files in LrC, then you've still got a structured backup copy.

In addition to above, I would recomend that you move files in batches of no more than 1000 files. Yes it will take ages, but better that than data loss due to crashes.

[JohanElzenga]

There is a fast way of doing this, but it has a lot of disadvantages, depending on how you currently work with your catalog. The option is that you first select all images, and choose 'Metadata - Save Metadata to Files'. Then you can remove all images from your catalog (or even easier, start with a new catalog) and import the images again, this time using the option in Lightroom to create a dated folder hierarchy on import. You can do that by choosing MOVE at the top of the dialog, not ADD.

The advantage of this is that this will create the desired folder hierarchy and preserve your edits and added metadata like keywords. The disadvantage is that quite a few things are not stored in XMP, so you will lose those. These things are edit history, virtual copies, flags, stacks, collection memberships, and everything that I forgot to mention.

[Guest]

XMP files sound like a great workaround, since i barely use any of the things u mentioned. thank you