How are locally stored photos organized in LR CC

[S. Jonker]

Apologies for possibly a newbie question: I get the idea of LR CC syncing all my photos through adobe’s cloud, but I do want to maintain a locally well-organized folder structure on my own HDas well.

When I tick “Store a copy locally” it creates a folder on the specified location, but I fear it will be an unorganized dump of all locally stored copies.

• How do I maintain a good older structure on my own HD?
• When I download photos during a trip from my camera on a mobile device and create an album for it, how does LR CC organize the local storage of it on my desktop at home?

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

If you use the "Store a copy of all originals" option, LRCC organises them into a standard date-based folder structure in the format yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd. Certainly not an "unorganized dump", but also not a structure that you can change.

That "store a copy locally" option will apply to ALL original images that are added to the cloud from any of your connected LRCC apps/devices, so anything you add to a mobile device will, after the upload sync to the cloud, eventually be added to the local copy when you next start LRCC on your desktop.

[S. Jonker]

Thanks Jim,

I have a big database historically, with YYYY/EVENT NAME as a structure and would like to keep using that on my HD when I start using LR going forward. I like the concept of LRCC and it‘s syncing abilities, but it would be nice if it would mirror the folder/album structure localy instead of it’s own YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD structure. Reading through many blogs it seems I need to go for Classic CC to be able to keep using my HD folder structure, which still has some syncing capabilities but not as rich as LRCC, correct?

[Jim Wilde]

There are various things you could do:

1. Use Classic as the main system, importing your current structure as is, then you can sync your images as smart previews to the cloud. That's good enough for most viewing/sharing and even editing needs online or on mobile devices. Because you can't sync folders to LRCC, only individual images or collections, there's an option in Classic to create collections that replicate the folder structure, so you could do that, sync them, which will create albums of the same name in LRCC. But you are right, syncing capabilities between Classic and LRCC are restricted in various ways,

2. Use Classic as an intermediate step, i.e. import all into Classic, create the collections based on the folder structure, then migrate the Classic catalog into LRCC. That puts originals into the cloud, and would start you off with the albums already created based on the collections in Classic. You then no longer need or use Classic, but the only issue is that you won't have a local copy in your preferred structure.

Basically you need to figure out what is more important to you....having the local folder structure that you prefer, or having full cloud functionality based on original files in the cloud.

Personally, I've always found folders are far too restrictive as an organisational tool, so I always use one of the standard date-based folder schemes and do my organising inside Lightroom.

[Theresa J]

LrCC doesn't have a folder structure. It organizes images by date using metadata. You can further organize your photos with albums, but albums are really virtual folders. They can't be mirrored in a locally stored copy.

The other thing many users don't understand is that a locally stored copy from LrCC is simply a duplicate, synced copy of what is in the cloud. This gives you the ability to work while offline. It is a mirror of the cloud though. If you delete an image from LrCC it is deleted from the cloud, AND your locally stored copy.