P: Import maintaining folder structure

[Sean Clarke]

As I've spent years sorting all of my photographs out into folders and sub-folders I naturally want to maintain that in Lightroom CC.

How can I import hundreds of different folders and sub-folders into Lightroom CC and maintain their structure?

Even when importing from an existing Lightroom Classic Catalog, there doesn't seem to be a way to automatically maintain the folder structure.

I don't want to add 50,000+ photographs and have to re-organise them

Any thoughts ??

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

All your folders are marked as missing? That would suggest your originals are gone or moved, but the migration wouldn't have done that... any idea what would have happened?

In your Classic catalog, if you convert the folders to collections, reenable sync and mark each of the collections to sync, then the collections themselves would sync to the cloud, but you'd need to manually recreate any hierarchy as that only transfers during a migration.

[Simon Prutton]

I’m having to fix the reorganization of 20000 photos right now as the tools in Lightroom suck so badly.I have had the worst tech support experience of my entire life. The transition in either direction between the two platforms (classic & cc) is absolutely pathetic.

Lightroom Downloader is an absolute joke.

[Simon Prutton]

Victoria, I appreciate that you’re trying to help but this kind of band-aiding is a problem. The problems with migration need to be solved more completely and thoroughly. I am having to rebuild my whole catalog right now due to the current crappy current situation and frankly terrible support from Adobe. We don’t need tricks...we need fixes.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

What other kinds of issues are you having with migration, other than not reading the instructions before starting? 

There's no need to rebuild the catalog, even after migration you can still sync the collection membership from Classic, although you'd need to recreate the hierarchy.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

If you'd like to tell us the kind of problems you're having, perhaps in a new thread, we'll be pleased to help you sort it out.

[Simon Prutton]

I read everything I could find online and am a regular reader of your blog. I have tried numerous approaches and nothing has worked for me - thousands of photos are missing...photos that I can easily export from Lightroom CC...so I am halfway through a rebuild from scratch.

But this is all completely avoidable if Adobe were to provide relatively simple migration tools that pulled the catalog from one account and moved it to another. It would be trivial for their database folks to do this (I have some experience with database management) they just don’t want to do it.

I was also gravely misled by the online support team. The first person I spoke did not understand what was possible and wasted 2 hours while he disappeared up his own incompetent ass. I was transferred to someone else eventually who suggested some other things to try but nothing worked.

My point is that it should not be necessary to have all of these threads with these questions from confused and frustrated users. Adobe should fix the issues so it is simple to manage our photos between accounts.

I love everything else about this package and cannot see any app anywhere that mirrors it’s functionality...and I have looked at them all this week...so I am committed to spending hours exporting albums and re-uploading them. I just wish Adobe could get its head out of its butt on fixing this simple stuff.