How to enter the first folder in LR 6

[John Chaille]

My friend is starting to use LR 6 on Mac OS. He is having trouble creating the first folder in the heirarchy under the Folders Bar in Left Hand panel. This folder will be the apex or parent folder, in which all other subsequent folders and subfolders will be placed. Please give the steps to put this apex folder in place in the LR folder hierarchy. Thanks Much

John Chaille

{Moved from Lightroom Cloud to Lightroom Classic Forum by Moderator}

[cmgap]

Thy this: Right-click on the top most folder and select Show Parent Folder.

[dj_paige]

Create the folder using your operating system. Then in Lightroom, Import photos into subfolders of this folder. See section 5 of this document to create (in this example) dated subfolders under the parent folder you choose.

[John Chaille]

Thanks.

John

[richardplondon]

The basic idea is that folders are reported inside LR's Folders panel, because you have imported photos which live inside those folders. Any folder which has got an imported photo recorded as living inside, must show there. Any folder which lives directly inside another displayed folder, is shown nested inside that. However when there is no such immediate connection between displayed folders, they may be shown "loose". The solution to that is the "show parent" option advised by @cmgap: so that 'linking' folders which do not happen to have any imported photos themselves, can still play their part in displaying the overall folder hierarchy.

What is not a helpful concept, is any notion of needing to first see folders inside LR, before you can import photos that live within those folders. The Folders panel is a summary listing of the folder locations of all the Catalog's imports, and showing additional folders is merely changing the layout of that listing after the fact. However, doing this can make the real overall folder hierarchy more useful towards searching and managing things in LR.

On the other hand, one of the strengths of this setup is that only folders positively relevant to the LR library are otherwise displayed.

[dj_paige]

richardplondon says:

"What is not a helpful concept, is any notion of needing to first see folders inside LR, before you can import photos that live within those folders."

Excellent point. Very well-phrased. Brilliant.

I would like to add my further opinion that if you go down the path of thinking Lightroom is a file browser (such as Windows Explorer or Mac Finder), you are approaching this the wrong way since Lightroom is not a file browser; and furthermore this incorrect belief that it is a file browser will cause many hours of frustration and lack of productivity. (we see this time after time here in this forum).

There are plenty of beginners tutorials at Adobe.com, YouTube and a free e-book at Lightroomqueen.com that should be consulted by anyone interested in learning Lightroom.

[GoldingD]

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/create-folders.html