Is there a way of customizing importation of a catalog?

[kichigai]

My question currently relates to LrC version 13.0.1 but I had the same questions for LrC version 12.

I work with two catalogs. My main catalog supports about 50,000 images on a NAS. The second catalog is my temporary travel catalog supporting images on my laptop.

The primary folder for images on my NAS is "Photos" and then I have secondary-level folders for each year, and tertiary-level folders that are labeled with a year, month, and location. Then under each tertiary folder, there is a folder called "In progress". Photographs stay in the "In Progress" folder until they are keyworded and processed as appropriate at which point they are moved up one level. To clarify the following is an example of the path:

 - Photo \ 2023 \ 202311 - New York City \ In Progress

When I am traveling I am offloading pictures daily from my camera, drone, and iPhone onto the hard drive of my laptop using Lightroom and a similar hierarchy that would look like the following:

-  **Travel Photos and catalog \ Travel Photos \ 202311 - Savannah\In Progress

So when I return home I need to be able to import the "202311 - Savannah" folder and any sub-folders into Photo\2023\ in my main catalog and onto my NAS.

But what happens is that when I do the "catalog import" it places Travel Photos\202311 - Savannah under Photos\2023 and then I have to do a second step of dragging the 202311 - Savannah folder (and sub-folders) and place it under Photos\2023. The third step is to delete a now empty folder called "Travel Photos" that still resides in the main catalog as Photos\2023\Travel Photos.

This works OK if I have only been to one location but on some trips, I go to from 6 to 8 different places and now this process becomes more laborious and more prone to mistakes.

Is there a better way of achieving my goal or am I going to have to continue with my current methodology until Adobe creates a more versatile import module???

My apologies for the long-winded question but I felt I needed to adequately explain my current process with the hope that someone can show me a better way.

[JohanElzenga]

When you import a catalog, you can choose not to move the images. Then, after the import is done, you can move them manually where they need to go.

A much better approach would be to stop using folders as organisation method. Lightroom is designed to do this differently, and much better: this is what collections and smart collections are for. You can simply store your photos in their final folders, and then use an 'In Progress' (smart) collection.