How many backslashes?

Does it matter where your catalog is located? No, of course not, it can go anywhere YOU want it to be. My one catalog is at D:\Lightroom Catalog

Suggestion: you're concerned and spending time on organizing your catalog files. I suggest you put that effort into organizing your photos inside LR, and leave the catalog names as they are, there are no negative consequences.

Suggestion: you have multiple catalogs? Unless you have a really good reason to separate your photos (like business vs personal), one catalog is the way to go.

Hi Ole,

Inside a backup folder you will find only the .lrcat-file, not the previews folder.

They are created in case your real working catalog might get corrupted.

So I do not grasp why you would want to rename one of your backup catalog files?

If you want to change the name of a catalog surely only your working catalog file would be worth the trouble? That is the second one, outside a \Backup\ folder, and with a <name> Previews folder right at its side. Where you would change the <name>part of both, as in your instruction.

Cornelia

Obviously, the catalog folder name and catalog file name is bothering you, but why? If you double-click on the LR icon on your desktop, it takes you right away to this catalog; you don't even need to know the folder name or file name.

The second one (as you refer to) does not contain any photos taken after last October. Would it be a good idea to import the missing photos (from my external HD) to this catalog, and then start using this? (I should have started out in the beginner's group here, I suppose . . . . )

What? A 2nd catalog? I thought we had addressed this issue again. One catalog for all your photos. You can merge the catalogs by selecting one catalog as the master, then in taht catalog File->Open Catalog and point LR to the second catalog (repeat if there are more than two)

Methinks you have spent way too much time worrying about catalogs, and not enough time on organizing and editing your photos.

If you have a catalog that works, that's all you need.

Hmmm ... cleaning up "My Pictures" ... I think again this is spending time on the wrong things.

It used to be that folders were the way to organize. Now that you have LR, you don't have to use folders as your method of organizing ... in fact, there are other more powerful ways to organize that LR provides, that don't involve folders. These are keywords, captions and other metadata. You can leave your "My Pictures" folder intact, don't move a thing. Instead, add keywords, captions and other metadata as necessary to your photos. Once you have keywords (and captions and other metadata), you then search in LR for photos that contain the desired metadata. You no longer search your folders for your photos, and in fact, it simply doesn't matter the state of "organization" or "disorganization" of your "My Pictures" folder.

Hi Ole,

As long as you have one root folder encompassing every image you want to keep (such as probably "My Pictures"-folder) it is sufficiently organized.

You will move this folder (As-Is, with every weird subfolder!) to your new computer, along with your real working catalog and previews folder (the latter for convenience - you can let your new computer recreate the previews, but it may take more than the hours of 1 night, depending on the size of catalog and chosen preview size).

Should you have "?" for missing images and folders in LR on your new computer you will reassign the top root folder and everything should be spick&span.

I am not quite a fan of the *big electronic drawer* for REALLY everything, but depending on how much you shoot you should be well served e.g. by a date-folder structure with one folder per month (or even year?). 3000 images in one folder is without any problems, even in bug-times as in LR4.0.

But as dj_paige said, it is not worth while to reorganize the past.

Just start with such for new imports, let LR create these destination folders inside "My Pictures" during import. Then spend your time for other organisation. Ask yourself and the ones around you who may inherit your image data: how would you search for pictures several years/decades ahead? That is how you create dumb or smart collections, assign keywords and fill the title- and caption fields. No need to do much for location keywording any more if you feel comfortable with the map module.

Here is where I have my LR-knowledge from: Victoria Bampton's "The missing FAQs": http://www.lightroomqueen.com/books/adobe-lightroom-4-missing-faq/

Have fun, Cornelia

Hi,  I see that in using Lightroom you can tag photos in your existing folder structure. I assume this means that if I had say a hundred photos say 10 in each of 10 folders, I could (once the photos had been tagged) search among all 100 of these photos using Lightroom.  My question is can you do this in Bridge?  It seemed to me not.  It seemed to be necessary to dump the files into one big folder.  this would mean destroying my current folder structure (which I like because there are certain .doc files I like to keep in the same folders), or making copies to be used only in Bridge.  This would greatly increase processing time for new phots - they would have to be added to two folders - with great potential for errors.  Do  you know if this is a basic difference between lightroom and Bridge, or if I have missed something?  I really appreciate people's help!

Thanks, Pat