Folder location question for Lightroom users

piolet_rampe

I am beginning to use Lightroom (2.xx) and have previously used a little Photoshop but found it to be way too much for most of my needs. I have used Photoshop Elements for a couple years (yeah I know) and found some features I like, but many I would like more control over.

I am stumbling on a bit of a hurdle in my transition. The hurdle is related to my directory location for my photography. I like to keep it simple, using "C:/Photos" as my location in Windows 7. LR wants me to create a new directory for my photos, but insists that it start out as an empty directory. In Elements, I have the option to "watch" any given folder and have the program build the image library automatically, which gives me a convenient starting point for selecting images requiring further work. LR just isn't designed to work that way, however it is much easier for me to see all my photos at the beginning of my workflow which is what I want.

I am not excited about having more than one directory location where my images are. I like to be able to find an image file on my own using windows explorer or any other application.

Does anyone have any tips on migrating to using Lightroom who also found this step to be puzzling? Thank you.

BradfordBenn

I use Lightroom 3.2 on Mac since 1.0, so I am not sure how much this will apply. My hunch is that many of the concepts are the same though. In Lightroom you can have the items added to library but keep them in the current location. Also on the Import function one can specify where to put the images. Between these two functions and setting you should be able to place the photos in what ever directory you want. This link might help http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/2.0/WS427A4C94-2499-456d-8E17-AE09D3316A03.html One can also have a watch folder to use for auto importing http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/2.0/WS1FAB59DE-8867-4052-BA02-5CF6C163CD29.html I think you should be able to configure it to your needs. I am able to find the images using Finder without an issue on the Mac.

Hope that helps.

RobSylvan

It sounds as though you are trying to set up an Auto Import? Is that right? I'm not sure I completely understand your workflow, but perhaps this may help.

With Lightroom, for auto import to work the "watched" folder does have to start empty, but when Lightroom senses a photo in that folder it moves it to a destination folder of your choosing.

So, you can keep C:/Photos as your primary folder structure. You just need to create an empty watched folder at any location of your choosing, and then designate a folder within C:/Photos as the destination folder.

So, let's say you have an empty watched folder on your desktop and you designated a folder called C:/Photos/Needs Work as the destination folder. Once you've configured and enabled Auto Import you can drag and drop or save photos to the watched folder and Lightroom will A)Move them to the destination folder and B)Import them into the catalog.

arodney

piolet_rampe wrote: »

I am not excited about having more than one directory location where my images are. I like to be able to find an image file on my own using windows explorer or any other application.

Thats a good idea! My suggestion is to dedicate a drive that has nothing on it but your images, and the Lightroom associated files (catalog, presets, irdata etc).

Use a well organized folder structure for organizing the images. We could go into great detail about this, there are lots of options, but keep in mind that the actual structure you build on this drive will be exactly mimicked in Lightroom as seen below. This means when you view the folders in Explorer (I’m on a Mac, so I’d say the desktop), you can find any image based on this folder structure AND it will appear the same way in Lightroom. Having one dedicated drive means you can easily backup your images and all the associated LR files, you don’t have this scattered all over the place on one (or multiple) drives.

As for folder structure, there are many ways to accomplish this. This image from a presentation I’ve done on organizing LR may help (note the use of unsettled folders too):



IMHO, relying solely on LR to find images, or using proprietary methods doesn’t leave you a back door if you decide to use a different DAM in the future or if you have to locate images without having LR. A well organized folder structure accomplishes this, it also ensures you can use LR as easily as Explorer in knowing where you put those images.

piolet_rampe

RobSylvan wrote: »

So, let's say you have an empty watched folder on your desktop and you designated a folder called C:/Photos/Needs Work as the destination folder. Once you've configured and enabled Auto Import you can drag and drop or save photos to the watched folder and Lightroom will A)Move them to the destination folder and B)Import them into the catalog.

Bingo, that is where I am hesitant. I created an empty directory within C:/Photos/Watched_Folder and dumped all my image directories in there. I have a couple hundred directories, most of them named by date as is the default when you download images from the camera. It does not appear to be "auto importing" any images and I fear that this program wants the auto watch folder to only have image files in it, and no folders or directories. What I really want to accomplish is to have Lightroom provide me with access to all my existing images as the first step when I fire up the program. This would allow me to navigate to the image(s) I am interested in working on without first using some other software program to move these images prior to my Lightroom work. It seems Lightroom is designed for the workflow of someone using it immediately upon downloading images from a camera, but is not designed to help someone who already has a library of images from which they wish to work on.

Although the program is in a completely different league, Photoshop Elements has a handy ability to watch a directory, and all sub-folders within that directory.

Why was this designed like this? Why not allow the user to populate their Library with their existing image directories of their choosing?

jfriend

piolet_rampe wrote: »

It seems Lightroom is designed for the workflow of someone using it immediately upon downloading images from a camera, but is not designed to help someone who already has a library of images from which they wish to work on.

If you want to use an image in Lightroom, you just have to import it first. If you want all your existing images to be available in Lightroom, then just import them all. You don't have to move them anywhere on your hard disk. Just configure Lightroom to leave them on disk where it finds them and then tell Lightroom to import your entire image hierarchy. It will catalog them all and from then on, you can access all of them in LR. This is a one time operation to give you access to all your existing images. LR has to index them, process their metadata and put them in your catalog.

From then on, anytime you add new images to your computer, you will also want to import them. I do that automatically because I use the Lightroom import facility to both copy them from my CF card to my computer and import into LR in one operation.

BradfordBenn

piolet_rampe wrote: »

Why not allow the user to populate their Library with their existing image directories of their choosing?

One can import/add images from any location they want. Under the file menu go to Import Photos... and select Add if you are using LR3. It has a settingoption to include looking in the nested directories under the selected directory. It will then allow you to leave the images in the directory you want but still have the cataloging and keywording functions of a Lightroom catalog. In LR2 I believe it is called something similiar but the idea is the same. There are some challenges from what I hear about having your directories live on a network drive; I have not tried it myself.

The auto import "watched" folder option only looks at the top level of the directory. Once configured you can have the Auto Import function configured to place the images into directories following the rules that you outline. I find this a huge time saving to have my configuration of Lightroom import the pictures, convert them to DNG files, and place them into the directory I have specified as sub directories that are based on year, month, and day. I can then still browse through Explorer/Finder to the directories and find things.

Lightroom is very configurable and is designed to provide many of the features that you are outlining. The challenge is that Adobe uses slightly different meanings and limitations for the same function in different applications. Where in one program auto import scans subfolders in another it is just the top level.

Using the Add option or Import and leave in place (depending on the version you are using) one is able to bring in their existing catalog to Lightroom. This process is what I did when I started using Lightroom.

piolet_rampe

Thank you all for your patient replies. I did finally discover the feature in LR2 to import everything inside a particular folder and it is now importing all 19000 images! This will get me off the ground with my existing collection. I will have to find out another way to automate importation of new directories since the "watched folder" feature only works at the higher level and not at the subfolder level which is where all those new directories with dates will be located.

I want to take the time to get this file location dialed in before I really start to work in this program, otherwise I will not have a good understanding of where my material is kept once I am done.

RobSylvan

I'm glad you figured it out, and now I better understand what you are trying to do. The auto import is great for when you are shooting tethered, scanning photos to a specific folder, or perhaps some other use where you are saving new photos to a specific folder (I use it with my Eye-fit card). Auto Import is not designed to bring in your entire existing directory tree. In fact, it can only "watch" a single folder. It ignores subfolders.

Now that you have your entire folder tree imported, there is a beta plugin that you might want to try called Folder Watch that can monitor a folder or a folder tree and automatically import new photos in place. I've been using it for awhile and so far so good.

Before you go any further though, if you really want to understand the relationship between the Lightroom catalog and your photos I highly recommend this (free) video tutorial by George Jardine. He actually has a whole 4.5 hour series of tutorials on just the Library workflow alone ($25).

piolet_rampe

RobSylvan wrote: »

I'm glad you figured it out, and now I better understand what you are trying to do. The auto import is great for when you are shooting tethered, scanning photos to a specific folder, or perhaps some other use where you are saving new photos to a specific folder (I use it with my Eye-fit card). Auto Import is not designed to bring in your entire existing directory tree. In fact, it can only "watch" a single folder. It ignores subfolders.

Now that you have your entire folder tree imported, there is a beta plugin that you might want to try called Folder Watch that can monitor a folder or a folder tree and automatically import new photos in place. I've been using it for awhile and so far so good.

Before you go any further though, if you really want to understand the relationship between the Lightroom catalog and your photos I highly recommend this (free) video tutorial by George Jardine. He actually has a whole 4.5 hour series of tutorials on just the Library workflow alone ($25).

Thanks for these recommendations. I have not tried the plugin you recommend yet, but I did just watch the video you link to. That is a very good video, and the rest of the series is probably a very good value.

I guess I am still confused about "Why" Adobe created LR in this fashion. In other words, why did they design the program to not "watch" and entire directory tree, similar to PS Elements or Picasa, but instead requiring the user to purposefully navigate to a particular directory and import those images into a catalog. This is not a complaint so much as a real interest in knowing what they had in mind here. Since most default imports from camera to computer will create a subfolder based on the date, most users will find themselves manually navigating over to these directories and manually selecting an import to catalog. The "Library" settings for LR would suggest that the program is intended to be your one stop shop for organizing, editing, and output, but the barriers established seem to suggest that the intent is to have LR be the program to use for select images, and not necessarily everything that you ever shoot.

BradfordBenn

piolet_rampe wrote: »

Since most default imports from camera to computer will create a subfolder based on the date, most users will find themselves manually navigating over to these directories and manually selecting an import to catalog. The "Library" settings for LR would suggest that the program is intended to be your one stop shop for organizing, editing, and output, but the barriers established seem to suggest that the intent is to have LR be the program to use for select images, and not necessarily everything that you ever shoot.

My interpretation of the way the software is designed is to be the tool that is used to import from the memory card or camera. The pictures are copied directly off the card to the folders that the user specified, in the structure that the user specified. There is the ability to place a second copy elsewhere for those that want to - I use it to place backups on another drive.

I use LR for everything I shoot; Blackberry, Point & Shoot, DSLR, ScreenCaptures even. I use the tagging and flagging tools to organize everything. So that after LR imports things into the directories I have setup (Year>Month>Day) I can then browse starting at the Year and it rolling everything up so I don't have to dig, or Month... etc. I then use the P and X keys to decide what to keep and delete (if you have caps lock on it will advance to next photo after flagging. Then one can batch delete all the "X" reject photos from either the catalog or the catalog and the hard disk.

The database can handle managing everything you ever shoot. I personally hit 50,000 images in a catalog at one point and others on this forum have hit higher.

Hope this helps.

jfriend

BradfordBenn wrote: »

My interpretation of the way the software is designed is to be the tool that is used to import from the memory card or camera. The pictures are copied directly off the card to the folders that the user specified, in the structure that the user specified. There is the ability to place a second copy elsewhere for those that want to - I use it to place backups on another drive.

I use LR for everything I shoot; Blackberry, Point & Shoot, DSLR, ScreenCaptures even. I use the tagging and flagging tools to organize everything. So that after LR imports things into the directories I have setup (Year>Month>Day) I can then browse starting at the Year and it rolling everything up so I don't have to dig, or Month... etc. I then use the P and X keys to decide what to keep and delete (if you have caps lock on it will advance to next photo after flagging. Then one can batch delete all the "X" reject photos from either the catalog or the catalog and the hard disk.

The database can handle managing everything you ever shoot. I personally hit 50,000 images in a catalog at one point and others on this forum have hit higher.

Hope this helps.

This is exactly how I use LR too. All images come off the camera and go right into a date coded directory hierarchy that LR creates as they are imported. I don't put them on my hard drive and then later decide to import them into LR. They go directly from card reader into LR. The only images I don't have in LR are exported JPEGs which I find bothersome to have in LR because I don't want multiple copies of the same image. Those are in a separate directory hierarchy on a separate drive. I don't keep the exported images forever because they can be reproduced again from LR upon demand. I have 110,000 images in my LR catalog now.

chasgroh

BradfordBenn wrote: »

I then use the P and X keys to decide what to keep and delete (if you have caps lock on it will advance to next photo after flagging.

Hope this helps.

...WOOOHOOOO! CapsLk! (I get 3000 images at a time on occasion...this keyboard trick is golden!) I LOVE this forum!


cg

RobSylvan

An alternative is to go to the Photo menu in the Library module and check Auto Advance, then you can leave the Caps lock off. Also, when using flags the U key comes in handy when you can't decide between P and X but still want to auto advance to the next.