Duplicates

Lightroom Classic allows you to create collections that are virtual. That means you don't have to make duplicates of the images to assign or collect them in mulitple places. A collection is a virtual folder inside of your catalog. Don't create more than one catalog because they can't see the collections inside of each other.

When you remove an image from your Classic catalog you have the option to simply remove Classic's association with the file, or delete it completely from your drive. My recommendation is to get your files as organized as possible before you import into Lightroom Classic. If the duplicate images on your hard drives contain the same metadata and image name, Lightroom Classic will recognize it as a duplicate during the import. This can help you weed out duplicates without having to do it manually.

Hi Theresa,

    Thanks   I had figured that out, but the problem with deleting
gives two problems  1)  If I delete the copy from the hard drive, I have
to go and find it to see what damage I am doing.

                            2) If I delete the entry only from the
catalogue  am I going to leave a file out there somewhere which is lost
amongst the the others who all have a connection.

Thus my original question is whether Light Room is smart enough to
realise that it would be best to attach this file out on the drive to
the alternate copy that is still present in the catalogue or does it
just loses that file. It has the address and could give the user some
more options if necessary about what it should do with that connection?

  You are right it is best to make certain that you only import one
copy of each image. However does that get Lightroom to keep the disk
addresses of all the copies that are out there" I assume that it does as
it would be the sensible thing to do. I am actually trying to do this
choice and I am gradually expanding the size of the catalogue with that
option. However it would be interesting to do the reverse to find the
disk location of all files attached to a specific image so that I can
weed out the external files. I am having a hard time sorting the files
on my machine using light room. Some files have survived from different
disks and putting them back together is a pain. I have the additional
problem that light room is for a photographer putting together files for
export. I am using it as a clean up editing program so that I will
export the whole catalogue to a user database that people can look at by
logging in. However I start off by files collected over a 40 year period
and I will export it to another  year categorised data base ie identical
but with better lookig images. Is that a sensible way to go?

Only after that will I subset it into specific subject oriented
grouping. Will those groupings then contain files or reference back to
the original database?  It makes a big difference as I am at the moment
keeping the original files on an external drive that will be left in
storage in case of a major calamity but I can see no way these subject
oriented schemes can relate to the basic year based scheme I have
outlined. I am assuming that they will be the full sized images all
duplicates of the original. Is that a terrible way to go.

I don't want to spend the money for Adobe keeping this images spinning
around for years to be reviewed only occasionally.

Thanks for your help.  I suspect no one else has  this sort of problem