P: Rename catalog folders in batch directly from lightroom (add suffixes, prefixes, etc)

[Edwes5D80]

Bonjour,

Petites choses qui manquent au quotidien et qui seraient bien utiles :

- Pouvoir renomer des dossiers du catalogue en lot directement depuis lightroom (ajour de suffixe, préfixe, remplacement de chaîne, etc) (comme sur ant-renamer soft)

(le faire sur windows oblige à reconnecter les dossiers un à un, ou devoir tout resynchroniser, très fastidieux...)

Ce serait vraiment super.

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Hello,

I'm missing a few things that would be really useful:

- Be able to rename catalog folders in batch directly from lightroom (add suffixes, prefixes, replace strings, etc) (like ant-renamer soft)

(to do so on Windows requires you to reconnect folders one by one, or to resynchronize everything, which is very tedious...)

That would be really great.

[richardplondon]

Mass actual renaming of folders would not sit well in my opinion, with the general metadata based and data-protective principles of Catalog working.

An idea that I would prefer to see, could be if some sort of searchable and freely changeable text metadata could be associated with a particular physical folder name, increasing its usefulness as seen within the Catalog, without causing any actual change within the file system. To have the folder name appear fully different inside the Catalog and outside it would be misleading and confusing, but presenting the current metadata as some sort of obviously distinct suffix could work.

Say import settings produced an automated YYYY / MM / DD folder arrangement. An import today would go into a folder named just "10" in that example, which is not very meaning-rich. But if one could go to that folder and enter metadata text about the event and/or client or whatever - perhaps see this displayed as "10 [clientname eventname]"?

Or - more radically - how about applying keywords to the Catalog's record of a given folder? And then to have those keywords operate implicitly for the photos within, in addition to their own keywords, as well as making this folder itself more searchable in the folders panel.

Either option could be effectively the same, as if the same descriptive text was added to the actual folder name.

But without suffering the same wider consequences: inefficiency for regular backup, and disruption of paths for any other potential usages aside from LrC, of affected files (which may not themselves be imported in the Catalog) and affected subfolders and their contents. Everything suggests to me: the wisest course is to aim to leave file and folder arrangements alone, once first established.

Lightroom is simply not a file and folder manager. What you see in the Folders panel is not even a direct representation of the file system. It's a 'database report' produced solely from information held within the Catalog.

[Edwes5D80]

Thank you very much for your reply. I understand better why this is not possible.
However, when I rename a folder in Lightroom, it is reflected in Windows.
It's a shame not to be able to do this en masse because it's very restrictive to do it folder by folder when you have hundreds of folders. Very long, very tedious, very inconvenient.