Lightroom is renaming my albums?

[nzorach]

I have a few collections of images that I have categorized under different folders. It looks as though Lightroom-- perhaps in me switching between Classic and cloud- has renamed some of these by adding "2" to the end of the name. So, now I have a bazillion albums that now have "2" after them, even though they're divided into separate subfolders. This is thoroughly annoying, wastes a ton of time, and it never explained this to me.

I am wondering if it is because Lightroom Classic doesn't use the same file hierarchy system for folders, which is also baffling to me and makes the desktop version basically unusable because it shows all of my albums and folders in the same directory instead of showing them nested under sub-folders or albums.

Any ideas?

[JohanElzenga]

Folders in Lightroom Classic are real folders on your disk. Folders in Lightroom are totally different. I don't know why Adobe always confuses people by using inconsistent names, but what is called a 'collection' in Lightroom Classic is called an 'album' in Lightroom. Folders in Lightroom are what is called 'collection sets' in Lightroom Classic.

Of course that does not explain the '-2' behind the album names. Did you perhaps migrate your Lightroom Classic catalog to Lightroom, and then kept using Lightroom Classic and synchronized its catalog to the cloud? That could explain it.

[nzorach]

I did everything starting on the cloud (from scratch, brand new account) and then set up Classic so I'd have faster access and a physical backup on an external SSD. When I view them in Classic, I don't even see the album/folders, they're just all jumbled together. I do not understand for the life of me why two different iterations of the same software would operate completely differently from a standpoint of something as basic as how files are named and how they are organized in directories and hierarchies.

I've spoken with Adobe multiple times and they're like, "uh, I don't know, I've never heard of this issue."

I cannot trust that Adobe won't screw up my files if I can't trust that they're going to maintain the same naming conventions.

[JohanElzenga]

Lightroom Classic is software that originated many years ago, way longer than any syncing or even the concept of 'the cloud' existed. It was never meant to work together with Lightroom mobile, even though this is possible if you know how to make it work.

It sounds like you have set this up the wrong way, and as a result images are now duplicated. To be honest, because I do not know exactly what you did, I find it hard to give you advice on how to proceed. If you see all the images in Lightroom Classic together, then this could mean different things. One possibility is that you selected 'All Photograps'. That does show all images without any hierarchy. Another possibility is that you imported all the images in Lightroom Classic without creating a folder hierarchy and without creating collections. If you then synced this catalog to the cloud, where the same images already existed in albums, then that would be a recipe for such a mess.

Perhaps if you post some screenshots of Lightroom and Lightroom Classic it becomes clearer what went wrong.

[nzorach]

Perhaps I'm not understanding something here, but why does Adobe keep pushing me to use the desktop version (for example, every time I am trying to download a file from thumbnail view, which cloud does not let you do) if the software applications are fundamentally different between cloud-based and desktop-based.

This is not intuitive in the slightest and it is thoroughly obnoxious. I can't exactly reproduce the comparison because I have since renamed the errant files/ folders. But I will see if I can find a screenshot.

[JohanElzenga]

There are two 'desktop versions'. The app that is simply called 'Lightroom' is also known as 'Lightroom desktop'. This is more or less the desktop port of Lightroom mobile and this is what Adobe pushes. You are using Lightroom Classic. That is the latest version of the application that has existed for many years, and that version is definitely not pushed by Adobe in conjunction with the cloud. Quite the opposite; Adobe does not recommend to use it that way.

[nzorach]

Ok, I am officially lost. All I am using is Lightroom (in my browser) and LrC, which I access via the Dock (or CC desktop application). LrC is what Lightroom cloud is telling me to use so I can download files more easily to my desktop (when I said it doesn't allow downloading very easily from the cloud application), and LrC is what I used when it renamed all of my folders.

I guess I am just confused as to why Adobe with all of its billions of dollars would make two separate applications that handle file hierarchies and directories in such a way that they directly conflict with each other, given that LrC seems to not even use the albums/folders setup and so it's basically unusable if I want to look at my images in different systems of organization.

[JohanElzenga]

Ah, if you use Lightroom in your browser, then that is not Lightroom mobile but Lightroom web. That is the same cloud however, so that doesn't really matter much. The rest of the story remains the same however. Lightroom Classic was never intended to be the desktop app for your cloud content, so I would be very surprised if this was what Adobe says you should be using in conjunction with the cloud. Lightroom (non-Classic) is the desktop app for this. It works seamlessly with the cloud. Anything you see in Lightroom web, you'll see in Lightroom as well.

The reason why Adobe has two Lightroom versions is that they had no choice. When they started with the cloud and with Lightroom mobile (for iPad and iPhones), there already was this existing version of Lightroom (now called Lightroom Classic) that did not use the cloud to store photos, but stored them locally. And there were lots of Lightroom Classic users (including yours truely) that did not want this to be any other way. I have no desire to store my images in the cloud, if only because I have 200,000 images and videos, taking about 8TB of disk space! Buying 8TB cloud space would be hugely expensive. So Adobe clearly had two different Lightroom user types: photographers like me who did not want a cloud based Lightroom, and photographers who did like that idea. The only thing Adobe did that was really stupid is that they did not simply use an entirely different name for the new cloud based photo app. If they had (for example ) used 'Lightroom' and 'CloudPhoto' rather than 'Lightroom Classic' and 'Lightroom', then nobody would be confused right now.

[nzorach]

Someone deleted my response and I don't understand why.

It is frustrating to not have answers to my questions and to not be able to get support from Adobe itself because when I call them no one knows what I'm talking about.

Sorry if this ran afoul of moderator standards