Lightroom Import / Sorting via Metadata (date taken)

[Chris2202]

Hello Community,

I recently got myself a licence and imported about 30k pictures into my Lightroom Classic library (on Mac).

I selected to create folders for years and months and copy my imports into these to my disk. Unfortunately it seems that pictures, where the metadata clearly states it was taken in for example Nov-2016, were put into a June-2017 folder, generally some pictures are correctly sorted but some others have been put in very random folders. Is there a way to actually put them into date folders based on metadata?

Also, realise there is a "map" tab at the top right, but only very few pictures of mine show on on it even though 90% of my pictures have a GPS location within their metadata, is it possible to add the pictures to the map?

Thanks a lot for your help!

[Lauca]

For your firts questio, I don't see any automatic way. However, LR can help you a bit:

- In lr, select a folder where the is mispaced photos

- Open the filter bar

- In the "Date " tab, you will see all the capture dates of the photos in this folder.

- Click on the wrong date to select all photos having this capture date

- Manually move these photos to the correct folder.

About the map module:

The map module will show the location of the photos in the film strip. If you want to see the location of all your photos, go in grid view, in thz "Catalog" tab, click on "All the photos". Then go to the map module, all your photos should be in the film strip and their locations appear on the map.

[johnrellis]

"I selected to create folders for years and months and copy my imports into these to my disk. Unfortunately it seems that pictures, where the metadata clearly states it was taken in for example Nov-2016, were put into a June-2017 folder, generally some pictures are correctly sorted but some others have been put in very random folders."

If some of the photos don't contain a capture date in their metadata (e.g. because they're scans), then LR will use the last-modified date of the files as the capture date. Unfortunately, there's a bug with Import that causes these photos to be put into the wrong dated folders.

To fix this, you could select all the affected photos, do Metadata > Save Metadata To File, then remove the photos from the catalog (without deleting them from disk). Then reimport the photos, and they should be placed into dated folders that match the capture date shown in LR's Metadata panel.

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[Chris2202]

Thank you Lauca and John, much appreciated!

Response regarding Maps worked very well! 

Regarding the Metadata/Sorting issue, the thing is my pictures do contain metadata, but they still import into the wrong folder. I have attached two screenshots (maybe I am not expressing the issue correctly). First one shows the disk folder (2017), and when I go on the metadata tab on top I can see there are quite a few pictures from other years/months within this folder. Second screenshot shows that the picture indeed has metadata on it that would ideally make it sort itself into the 2016 Jan folder. 

Please let me know if I am not getting something here, newby after all. And many thanks again for your help on this.

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[johnrellis]

A determining factor is which metadata the photo has. I suggest you upload one of the photos that got misfiled to Dropbox or similar and post the sharing link here, and we can see if gets misfiled on other LR installations and examine its metadata closely.

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