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I've had LR 6 for a couple of weeks and I'm confused by all the folders that Lightroom produces. They have dates and some just have a couple of photos inside, some
have none. Is there some way that I can turn off the creation of these folders because I don't want them? Most of the dates are wrong but I just don't see that I need them.
I only want to work with four or five folders for easy backup and not have my images scattered in a bunch of folders. I'd appreciate any thoughts on this.
Paul Bottoms
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We don't know what folders you are talking about. It would help if you told the exact full folder path and name, along with a screen capture of what is inside the folders.
I only want to work with four or five folders for easy backup and not have my images scattered in a bunch of folders. I'd appreciate any thoughts on this.
May I urge you to consider a different plan and a different thought process?
The idea behind Lightroom is that it is a tool that you use for ALL of your images that you intend to keep (yes, I said ALL, as in 100%, no exceptions), and through Lightroom you create organization of the photos via keywords and other metadata. Your photos are stored in a very simple folder structure, which is a parent folder, with sub-folders using the capture date as the folder name. This is the Lightroom default, it takes zero effort on your part to create this parent folder with sub-folders.
The drawback to have four or five very large folders with your photos is that some operating system and Lightroom operations become very slow when you have such large folders. Furthermore, the folder structure I described in the previous paragraph is not hard to back up, in fact it doesn't get any easier than that to make backups, you select the parent folder to back up and every subfolder is included in the backup.
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These are folders in your operating system under C:\Pictures, you haven't shown us what is in these folders, so we can't say if you need to keep them or not.
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That is the import window and the section you have displaying is where you select the folders you would like to import From. Note the Source heading at the top, IE The Source, place, folders or memory card, you want to import images from.
You can click on the triangle at the left to collapse all of them. But all those folders exist on your hard drive.
Go to the Library module and show the Folders section of the left hand panel. Post a screen shot of that.
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LR doesn't create folders unless you have imported images from a camera memory card with specific instructions to place those images into folders by the dates they were taken or if you import images from your hard drive with the Copy option selected in the import dialog window and with the option to place them into folders by date as stated above.
You need to post a screen shot of the Library module showing the folders section of the left hand panel.
It would also help to review some tutorials on how LR works and how to work with LR.
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The folders in the shot. But I've already gotten the idea from your reply that I'm not going to be able to work that way and will
have to do it the way you suggest. Sometimes, the folder dates aren't accurate but on second glance, it it more
accurate than I first thought.
Thanks for your well thought out reply.
Paul