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With Lightroom CC, how make albums automatically be same name as PC folders?

Community Beginner ,
Jun 06, 2021 Jun 06, 2021

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Trying LR CC for first time and so far, not happy. With LR Classic, when you import photos from your PC, the photos are associated with the file folder or path as on your PC. So I could easily find photos in LR, since it matched my PC photo file structure, and then I'd put the edited photos in a new folder within that folder called "Processed."

Also, when I imported a batch of photos, that's when I'd add keywords for that batch.

With LR CC, is there any way to just make the LR album name match the PC folder name and path? From what I can tell, there isn't?

Also, where/how do I add keywords in CC? I saw one thing saying that unlike Classic, CC adds them "automatically." Huh? I'm sure some keyword like info can be added automatically but not all.

Thanks in advance. I really did try to find answers to these (I think) basic questions, before trying for help here.

 

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LEGEND ,
Jun 06, 2021 Jun 06, 2021

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The collection can be named whatever you choose. However, there is no provision to have the collection automatically match the folder name from which the images originated. I think part of that is because a collection can be created from images from multiple folders. So the collection name in Lightroom must logically match the collection name in LrC.

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Community Expert ,
Jun 06, 2021 Jun 06, 2021

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Because physical folders are generally inefficient as a means of gathering and organising images, both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Desktop provide better methods for that. Both use the "collections" system which allows images to be grouped into any number of different collections (Classic) and albums (Lightroom) regardless of where the image is physically stored. Because Classic only deals with locally-stored images, it also provides a view of the physical Folders where the images are stored. However, as the Lightroom images are stored in the cloud, the physical location is not available to the user, that is managed by the Adobe servers.

 

For those users who wish to sync images between Classic and Lightroom, using the collection/album syncing is the best way to organise your images. However, for those users such as yourself who prefer to organise using folders in Classic, there is an option (on the folder right-click menu) to automatically create collections which match the folders, i.e. same name, same content. Those collections can then be synced to the cloud, where they will appear as albums. However, whereas you can right-click>make collection on a folder with various sub-folders, and the result would be a Collection Set and Collections structure, only the collections can be synced, Collection Sets cannot....so you would have to manually organise the albums into the higher level structure (confusingly called "folders") in Lightroom.

 

Regarding keywords, you add those unsurprisingly in the Keywords tab, selected by clicking on the "Tag" icon at the bottom of the right-hand toolbar. A couple of things to note:

1. Keywords in Lightroom are in a flat structure, there is no keywords hierarchy available.

2. Mainly because of that, keywords do not sync between Classic and the cloud. Lightroom-entered keywords do, however, sync between all the various Lightroom apps, just not with Classic.

 

The "automatic keywords" you may have heard about is basically the AI-engine in the cloud which will analyse all images in the cloud and store "keywords" about the image. These internal tags are not exposed to the user, but they are used when you use the Lightroom AI (Sensei) search function.

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Community Expert ,
Jun 06, 2021 Jun 06, 2021

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A very important thing to understand about Lightroom cloudy is that there are no folders! All your images are stored in the cloud not on your own hard disk. It will download temporary copies as needed but these are copies. Your originals are in the cloud. This is fundamentally different from Classic and explains why the folder structure disappears. It also implies you need a radically different workflow from Classic if you want to use cloudy but be aware that most essential features from classic are missing. Printing, virtual copies, hierarchical keywords, easy exporting to social media, publish services, etc are all Classic only.

 

Cloudy can add keywords through the little icon that looks like a luggage tag. They are in a flat hierarchy and do not sync back to Classic. The automatic keywords are not exposed to the user. I.e you can't see the keywords adobes AI added to your images. It is a neat feature but pretty useless in general in my opinion as it is very non specific. It can for example recognize trees or boats in an image but it won't recognize specific things or events. It's also non hierarchical meaning that you can't separate things named the same but in different places.

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Community Expert ,
Jun 07, 2021 Jun 07, 2021

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quote

...be aware that most essential features from classic are missing. Printing, virtual copies, hierarchical keywords, easy exporting to social media, publish services, etc are all Classic only.

 

 

Also be aware that when Jao posts something like this he really means that these features are essential for him, but in reality there are clearly countless users of Lightroom for whom these "missing features" are irrelevant. Only the individual users can decide for themselves what are or are not "essential".

 

Looking at that list, and speaking as a Classic user who started out with RawShooter before it morphed into Lightroom version 1 back in the 2000's, I can probably count the number of times I've printed from LrC on the fingers of one hand.

Virtual copies? I could easily use Versions in Lightroom to achieve that.

Hierarchical keywords, yes that would be a "nice to have" in Lightroom but certainly not essential for me.

Easy exporting to social media? Well, the only social media site I occasionally export to is Facebook, which of course simply can't be done from LrClassic, but can be done from the Lightroom mobile app.

Publish Services? I used to be an extensive user of this feature until album sharing from the cloud became available (which lets me share without even having to export first)....I haven't used a publish service since then.

 

The main (only?) thing I would miss if I was to permanently transfer from Classic to the cloud would be Smart Collections, I certainly would like to see the equivalent in Lightroom at some point.

 

Don't get me wrong, I do agree with Jao that Lightroom is not for everyone, especially the high volume shooting power-users, but it's also clear that there are very many people who have welcomed and prefer the simpler and more modern cloud-based version. There's enough information available to compare the features of the two.

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Community Expert ,
Jun 07, 2021 Jun 07, 2021

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Absolutely true and thanks for the clarification. Lightroom Cloud is perfectly viable solution for many people. I did not mean to suggest this is unioversal truth. I do come accross a lot of people expecting perfect feature parity coming from Classic and end up sorely disappointed. If you approach it from a fresh perspective it is a nice program and I love the feature that it looks and acts identical on my iPad vs my desktop and my phone. That is a super useful feature. I heavily use both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Cloudy together by the way. I often use Cloudy on trips where I know I'll have good interent access and ingest all my images to it on a laptop or even my iPad. All images will already be there in Classic when I get back to my main computer to do real work but in the mean time, I can already post some images, do some editing and trust it will all be there. Unfortunately this workflow is not officially supported (Adobe even discourages it) but it is the best of both worlds for me. 

Cloudy has improved tremendously over the years. It just doesn't do everything I need it to yet and probably not for many years to come. It just doesn't scale to the 1000 images a day I do I often manage to shoot and the terabytes of data, even with gigabit fiber, are a bit much for Cloudy to deal with but if you shoot just a few images at a time or are mainly a phone shooter, Lightroom Cloud is a really good solution especially with the pervasive syncing between platforms.

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