How to keep folders organized when creating virtual copies in collections?

[Marc5CDB]

Hi,

What I want to do:

Make a collection of whatever (best of 2020, people, trees), edit the images (e.g. crop to a defined format), print, delete the collection or keep it for later use (depends).

How I would like to do it:

In order to not change my original edits in my folders (one folder per shooting/holiday/event), I create virtual copies.

The problem:

It creates a virtual copy in the original folder and a link to it in the collection. So, after making a best of 2020 with 100 photos, I have 100 virtual copies all over my folders. I make another collection and again 100 virtual copies all over the place. This is already a big mess only after 2 collections. How am I supposed to keep my pictures organizes over the years when I have hundreds of collections? A folder with 5 photos would maybe have 100 virtual copies in it when I use them a lot in my collections.

My questions:

Isn't that something that photographers do regularly, make a collection from different shoots? Don't they edit the photos after they make a collection?

I have seen many posts that explain how collections and virtual copies work and I fully understand that, but no one explains how to solve that problem and I just do not see how this cannot be a problem for almost every photographer. What did I miss?

[Jim Wilde]

Isn't that something that photographers do regularly, make a collection from different shoots? Don't they edit the photos after they make a collection?

By @Marc5CDB

Yes to both questions, but that can be done without a plethora of VCs being created all the time.

Personally speaking, I only use virtual copies whenever I want to develop/edit an image in different styles (e.g. colour and monochrome). I will routinely have many images appearing in different collections, but it would be very rare for me to want different edits based on different collections. So why are you creating VCs for all the images that you add to each collection? 

[JohanElzenga]

There is no reason to create a virtual copy when you add an image to a collection, unless you intend to change the edits of that image for just this collection. I understand that you do indeed change edits sometimes, but I can't imagine that you do that 100 times for each image. So it sounds like you often create virtual copies for no reason other than that you add the image to a collection. That does not make sense.