Comments on: Lightroom Catalog a mess? How to Organize all your photos in Lightroom

By: Colin Smith

Colin Smith — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 03:13:51 +0000

In reply to Paul W. Faust. Metadata based management is much better than folder based management. You can assign multiple tags to an image. Say you have a photo that belongs in multiple categories? Do you make multiple copies of the image? When you edit them, which is the current one? Having used folders for 30 years, I find that gets you into way more of a mess over time. Properly orginized tages and keywords within collections is a much better solution.

By: Paul W. Faust

Paul W. Faust — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 20:59:36 +0000

Not really sure why anyone would need album collections when all they need to do is put all of he same subjects into folders. My problem with this messed up Lightroom is finding how to name my files. And Bridge is even worst! And still they charge you ever month for the hassles they produce!

By: Keith Grey

Keith Grey — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 15:54:00 +0000

Hi,
Hope you can help me. Is there a way of re ordering albums in Lightroom mobile. I have created a load of albums, but I would like to change the order they are in. I can re order images within the albums, but I don’t know if you can change the order of the albums?

By: steve jones

steve jones — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:35:30 +0000

dont know if you can help me, have LR classic latest version. I have a list of keyword Person tags, e.g i had one called Fred and one fred bloggs. i knew fred was wrong, so i deleted the keyword and removed from LR, but the metadata had already been written to the files. how can i sort this out please ? i have quite a few files with Fred that need to be changed to Fred Bloggs….the other option is to do this in windows explorer or via a third party app, although if i change fred to fred bloggs externally LR wont know about the changes sorry but cant see a solution

By: Jamie Cornelius

Jamie Cornelius — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 18:32:23 +0000

I’m wondering, if I store edited images on an external drive, can I still delete them from my Mac Hard Drive? And be able to open them back up IF needed???

By: JennZ

JennZ — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 03:08:22 +0000

Not Colin, but yes, you can create hierarchies in Lightroom’s Collections. For example, my main catalog contains a “Dashboard” collection set. The Dashboard collection set contains an “All Work in Progress” and an “Asset Categories” collection set. The Asset Categories collection set contains File Type, Image Aspect Ratio, Image Rating, Image Size, and Asset Type collection sets. All these collection sets contain many collections and smart collections, (currently, more than fifty).

A couple of points to keep in mind when deciding which to create and where to put them are:

1. Only a Collection Set can contain another Collection Set.
2. Collection sets within a collection set sort before collections or smart collections.
3. You can only sync collections with Lightroom in the cloud.
4. You can move collection sets, collections. and smart collections by dragging and dropping them into another collection set.
5. There are tools for copying (duplicating) the collection or the set, deleting it, or creating a new Lightroom catalog populated with the collection’s images.

Hope this adequately answers your question EJ.

JennZ.

By: EJ Petranek

EJ Petranek — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 14:00:50 +0000

Colin, Is there a hierarchy in collections ? SET, Collection, Smart Collection maybe?

By: lisa

lisa — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 04:51:00 +0000

Hi Colin. Before I knew that moving folders/files and Individual images to other folders/Files and drives, I had already imported nearly all of my images from SD cards to LR. I am very new to this, and because I was working from two separate computers, I was trying to move all of my images to C drive to another drive, so that I could eventually gather them into folders and transfer them all to one computer. The result of this is total mayhem! I have multiple images, copies, catalog files on both computers and in LR, I have over 16,000 images, with about 12,000 that have the “!” “cannot be found” message on them.

Most of the sources I’ve looked at to try to figure out how to fix this, simply show an example of the finding a lost image or folder, by moving a file to another location to show that it can’t be found in LR. Then, they use the Locate feature to find it. This would be perfect if I had not made the mess that I have made by re-naming files, folders, copies, and moving from drive to drive. Btw, I don’t have an external hard drive yet, but plan to get one.

I am thinking I need to through my entire File Explorer, try to locate the original RAW images, put them all in one place, and uninstall LR and start over. However, I am wondering about the LR Catalog files that are also in various places. If I took those and put them all in one place, would that help, and be easier than trying to locate every original image? I am just learning photography, so I don’t have “client” photos. They are all practice photos. However, I don’t want to lose them. They show my progression through time, and I want to learn LR and PS well enough to use them for practicing my editing. All I know is that, I spend hours every day going through my File Explorer, as well as searching for, and saving tutorials, videos, classes, ebooks, etc, to try to educate myself on the entire photography-to-post processing process.

I just bought a Sony a6000, so I am also trying to learn how to use the camera and all about lenses, lighting, composition, exposure……! So, I am determined, but completely overwhelmed with it all, and I feel like I spend most days going in circles, making very little progress. I need some real help, that is specific to the issues I’m experiencing. I am quite sure I am not the first person who has gotten themselves into this type of mess. However, I have yet to find anything that addresses them to the extent that I need. Do you have any suggestions?

Thank you for your site, it has been one that I refer to nearly every day.
~Lisa