P: Allow LR to autocreate collections as it imports folders

[cliffords71082853]

Import Flow for those embracing Lightroom Classic:

I've had Lightroom for many years and found it's process and flow efficient. I gave up! I've been grinding through it to achieve some level of mobility yet I feel there is room for import efficiencies. 

Assumption: Most people coming into lightroom have an established base of photos. Thus they have directories and some structure, albeit, it may not be good. It is written under the assumption that one is starting new. This is not the case. Like me, and I'm sure others the burden of getting things into lightroom outweighs the benefit. 

Problem: Lightroom import will take photos from all directories including subdirectories and lump them into one import. This WIPES out the structure that was once a key element in one's previous organization.  One can add collections and sets etc but you have to scour the import trying to determine membership by name or image when the previous location contained that information. 

Potential Fix: Allow LR to autocreate collections as it imports folders. One can then work with LR tools to tag, rename, organize. 

Alternate Fix:Color code or otherwise show the origin location withing the "bulk" import so one can create collections. As it stands, and I learned painfully, the entire import remains in Previous Import. I removed the photos to better clarify the next collection creation only to discover the photos removed from Previously Imported were also removed from the new collection. Not Good!

As it stands the process is tedious and nets little direct gain of efficiencies. Getting photos in is clearly a benefit as the tools are powerful. It just the overhead is a lot like painting a car. You have to prep for 90% of the time and the actual painting only takes 10%.  

[Per Berntsen]

Problem: Lightroom import will take photos from all directories including subdirectories and lump them into one import. This WIPES out the structure that was once a key element in one's previous organization.  One can add collections and sets etc but you have to scour the import trying to determine membership by name or image when the previous location contained that information. 

The Folders panel will display all the folders you have imported from. If you can't see it, right click one of the other panels, like Catalog, and choose Folders from the context menu. Or go to Window > Panels > Folders, or press Ctrl+Shift+2.

As it stands, and I learned painfully, the entire import remains in Previous Import. I removed the photos to better clarify the next collection creation only to discover the photos removed from Previously Imported were also removed from the new collection. Not Good!

Previous import is a temporary collection, showing all photos from the previous import. If you imported from several folders, all imported photos from all selected folders will be displayed.

You can choose whether or not to include subfolders in the Import dialog.

[Sean McCormack]

If you use Add on a parent folder during Import, it doesn't copy or move the files, retaining the original folder structure. 

[cliffords71082853]

Here is the issue with Adobe and it's support, or lack of.  Most of it's user are not professional computer scientists. They are simply people who ground through a piece of crappy spaghetti code developing their own solution. They then put stuff on YouTube indicating how smart they are. 

Adobe lightroom may not even be a creation of Adobe. It might have been purchased and gobbed together. In the beginning a development team worked with the original developers to make it "adobe like". Those original developers are long gone and the "adaptive" team have long since gone. There are undoubtedly packages in adobe that nobody knows how it works, but they just use it. This puts a huge burden on the user.  

Fast forward to today. They attempted to modernize the code with a from scratch development using today's wiz kids. Unfortunately, it was feature rich with cloud, but feature poor, or at least unfamiliar to the old users who paid their dues on learning the old SW. So after much screaming "COKE CLASSIC" was returned and again gobbed up to allow some rudimentary linkage to CC. 

All the old issues still exist in Classic and they would like nothing better than to get rid of it like they did encore.  

Lightroom is a Database like many other databases. The DBMS is what you use. Most DBMS's will not allow you to access the core repository which in LR's case is a folder on your drive(s). There is a reason for this. Data integrity.  Aside from having swiss cheese data integrity at the ingress there are also numerous flaws (from what I can see). These flaws make for a significant amount of what I call eyeball time. 

Let's take my use case example. 

• I want to import a complete directory hierarchy of files organized by content. 
• I would like Adobe to import all the photos and subdirectories with some intelligence as I suggested. Tag each file with a folder id so I can find them when building up collections. Those old users of LR, call them historians (H) will say you can rename. More eyeball time. 
• Without some intelligent renaming system you may have a recent import folder with DCS-002, 003 or 100_028, 029, etc. So how to I know where this photo belongs. What member of a set is it from since subdirectory pulls all photos into one big blob! Such a simple fix. Even a rudimentary shell script could do "for each in find . -print" rename $ etc etc. and change all file names in each folder, but why should I have to do that outside of the DBMS! Better to have a solution that says rename files with folder ID and sequence. 
• There are so many anomalies I've discovered that even the adobe support can't understand. (because it's a hodgepodge of code and they are all new)
  • Ex: Spoke with chat support about the folder file count being wrong. He said I had missing files, I said then they should show missing and further, the count is wrong to the positive. I had 92 it showed 107.  Apparently that logic was too much. He went a searched for missing photos and found 700. Makes sense because I was/had removed. 
  • I was under the silly assumption that "folder" view was indeed a folder and that collections was the virtual representation. As it turns out I was wrong, folder is a snapshot of the import and is in itself a collection, not a view into a folder portal. But back to the 92 vs 107
  • Turns out I had some copies of a file, not sure how that happened because those copies were not in the source directory. After renaming I had a count of 107 where my source directory had 92. Turns out the copies get a duplicate number two 16 of 107's but...The folder count counts each for the total count, but not for the renaming? So it sort of makes sense for this as it's a duplicate but where is the center of truth? This is a complete violation of data integrity at a DB design. It even showed the same name unless you selected it? 

I come across this stuff all the time in adobe. I have tried repeatedly to change the grid background color to white so I can see the black characters against something I can discriminate from. It will not work.  The crack adobe team is working on it. The tech support sent me a help document for LR 2019? Wow, turns out the same guy who thought a larger number was missing files!!!

Anyway, this is a long rant. Adobe makes well feature products and I've used them since Version 1. My problem is I was an R&D leader for most of my career and a college professor in computer science and engineering. I've managed 1000's of projects with engineers from all over the world. I understand that this is not easy stuff. Something as rich featured as LR or PS has millions of lines of code.  The promise of OOD was to make support easier but it is counter to the truth. To make a change you need to understand the object library used. That means you have to learn each. Old code was localized and did have it's issue but today a SW engineer moves on to the new and shiny leaving a handful of newbies attempting to fix something that was spaghetti coded together. 

I've what their SW get worse and worse through the years. Eventually, they jettison it for something newer and fresh. ergo LRcc. 

I'll keep trying to develop my own homebrew solution like all the H's before me!

cds

[cliffords71082853]

this works well in steady state beccause photo counts can be handled by YOUR eyeball time. A more comprehensive solution that does not involve eyeballs because if you are importing 2000 photos it can't be done efficiently

cds