Deleting folders

[bartonlew]

I import my photos from my camera onto my computer and then Add them to Lightroom.  I try to create folders on my hard drive where the photos will always live to avoid linkage problems when importing in LR.  Somehow I have a bunch of folders that are named by date (e.g. 2017-05-31).  I don't know how or why these appeared but I don't want them or the photos they contain to appear in LR - they are visual clutter.  How do I get rid of them?  My version of LR is CC 2015.5 [1067055].  Thanks.

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

They appear because you (probably accidentally) told Lightroom to import your photos to these folders. If you don't want the folders or the photos that are in them (are you 100% sure?) then you can right-click on the folder name in Lightroom and then ... well ... you can figure it out from there.

CAUTION: if you remove the folders from LR, this also removes any work you may have performed on the photos in these folders, it is gone forever (unless you have backups), so be 100% sure you really don't want them. Yes, I know you said you don't want these photos, but the advice (especially for anyone else who is reading this) is to act with caution and be 100% sure before you delete things from Lightroom.

[bartonlew]

Thank you for your reply.  You said "They appear because you (probably accidentally) told Lightroom to import your photos to these folders."  The thing is that I never created folders with these names (year-month-day).  Maybe I imported photos without creating a folder for them first and this was some kind of "default" option because I didn't name/create the folder myself?  What if I did want to have access to these images I imported and worked on but put them in a folder that was descriptive of what they were - can I do that?  Is the lesson here that if you import photos onto your computer that you always do so to a folder that you have created yourself specifically for the images where they always live?  How can these types of problems be avoided?  Thank you.

[dj_paige]

bartonlew  wrote

Thank you for your reply.  You said "They appear because you (probably accidentally) told Lightroom to import your photos to these folders."  The thing is that I never created folders with these names (year-month-day). 

As I stated above, you have accidentally done this ... Lightroom only does what YOU tell it to do. You accidentally told LR to copy or move the photos at Import to folders with these default names.

What if I did want to have access to these images I imported and worked on but put them in a folder that was descriptive of what they were - can I do that? 

Yes, you can move the photos inside of Lightroom by dragging and dropping them to the desired folder.

Is the lesson here that if you import photos onto your computer that you always do so to a folder that you have created yourself specifically for the images where they always live?  How can these types of problems be avoided?  Thank you.

Honestly, that's nowhere near the information you need. The lesson is that you can put photos into any folder you want them to be in, either at Import or afterwards. You are in control. If a mistake is made, it can be fixed.

Having said all of that, my overall impression is that using folders as your primary organizing tool is a poor choice, because Lightroom gives you many superior tools to organize that don't have the drawbacks of folders — these tools are keywords, captions, titles, GPS locations and other metadata. To avoid these problems (which is what you asked), I recommend the extremely simple method of putting photos into DEFAULT date named folders upon import AND NEVER MOVING THEM AGAIN, and using the keywords and other metadata to achieve organization. By setting up a default, and not changing it, you don't run into problems. By never moving the photos again, you don't run into problems. By using keywords and other metadata, you get a powerful organization of your photos.

[bartonlew]

Thank you.  But I don't really understand how you would "organize" your photos just by keywords, captions, or titles.  They still have to live somewhere.  And creating a "default" folder with the date as the name doesn't tell you anything about the photos that are in there - unless you can remember exactly what you shot on 2016-12-11, or 2011-09-13, etc.  It seems to me that creating Collections is a really good way to organize things.  That said, I created a Collection into which I have imported photos, but before I created the Collection, I imported some that I now want to add to the Collection.  I right clicked on the folder here I imported these photos from but there was no option to "add to a collection."  There was, however, an option "Export this folder to a Catalog."  I thought there was only one Catalog - where "All Photographs" are stored (or rather their reference is).  So do you mind helping me with these 2 issues - moving photos to a Collection that was created after the photos were imported and telling me what "Export this folder to a Catalog" means?  Also, I am a newbie, so I am sure there are advantages to your method of organizing that I just don't understand.  Thank you for your help.

[dj_paige]

bartonlew  wrote

Thank you.  But I don't really understand how you would "organize" your photos just by keywords, captions, or titles.  They still have to live somewhere.  And creating a "default" folder with the date as the name doesn't tell you anything about the photos that are in there - unless you can remember exactly what you shot on 2016-12-11, or 2011-09-13, etc.

This is exactly backwards. You don't have to remember the date the photo was shot. It is very natural to remember the photo's content, and by describing the photo's contents using keywords and other metadata, you to search for photo content using keywords or other metadata to search. The folder becomes irrelevant. You don't need to know what folder the photo is in because Lightroom knows ... Lightroom does the hard task of remembering what folder things are in so you don't have to remember what folder things are in.

Collections are a form of metadata that allows you to find photos similar to what I described above, by content. I prefer keywords to collections for two reasons: keywords can remain with the photos when you export it or use it outside of LR, while collections cannot remain with the photo; and there are more search tools for keywords than there are for collections.

I right clicked on the folder here I imported these photos from but there was no option to "add to a collection."

You can drag and drop photos into collections.

telling me what "Export this folder to a Catalog" means

It means you are creating a brand new catalog which will reference the contents of that folder that you right-clicked on. In general, the only time you would want to create a new catalog from a folder is if you wanted to communicate with some other Lightroom catalog (for example, if you took a laptop out and added some photos to the laptop LR catalog, then you could use this command to create a catalog to transfer everything in that folder to a LR catalog on your desktop computer when you returned home.)

[bartonlew]

Thank you very much for the additional information; much appreciated!