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1. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
Geoff the kiwi Sep 30, 2012 12:51 AM (in response to nahcr)Create the new/empty folders in Lightroom and they will be in the Folder panel and on your HD.
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2. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
richardplondon Sep 30, 2012 2:08 AM (in response to nahcr)I have an impertinent question: is there no way you would consider using Lightroom's ratings, and LR's own image management methods, so that you can avoid physically moving the images around or changing their names during your workflow?
Of course there is nothing wrong with using LR however you please; but IMO your suggested method seems to just replicate how one might do things in Bridge or similar; and thus to miss out on the many efficiencies and advantages that arise from using a database system instead.
Lightroom is set up to easily show you a selective view based on image ratings, or many other attributes or combinations of attributes. This is flexible and immediately responsive in a way that physical folders cannot be. For example, LR can already show you the images (within a certain wider selection) that have not yet been rated. Or it can show you the images that have been rated, or just the 3-star ones, or those 2 stars or greater, etc. Changing a rating on an image will immediately cause it to appear in or disappear from the relevant views - which may be Smart Collections, or filtered views deriving from a particular folder or tree of folders.
This behaves just like automatic, dynamic folders that manage themselves; and that give the appearance of duplicating your images into various different "places", on the fly, but without actually doing so.
This way, in combination with keywords and Collections, flags and other image attributes, you can have many different kinds of grouping concurrent at the same time, instead of just the single kind of grouping that a folder constitutes.
To take an example: by using independent attributes of the image each time, Image A and image B can be shown together with other images for one purpose, and image B and image C can be shown together with other different images for a different purpose, but this time without showing image A.
When you use just physical folders to organise things, by contrast - if images A and B are located together, and also images B and image C are located together, then images A and C have to be located together; even if that is not what you, ideally, want to see.
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3. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
nahcr Sep 30, 2012 6:59 PM (in response to richardplondon)This is a reasonable suggestion. However, I hesitate to do this at least for now. My pictures are usually pictures of a single plant which I generally want to sort into folders based on their scientific name. I have thousands of these folders. I also want to know where they were taken and an aesthetic grade. In the past I tried a database product and discovered that I had no control over the database and when it was corrupted, all of my organization was lost.
As far as I know, the Lightroom database is also not accessible directly. To my mind, this creates some possible problems. First, if I ever decide to move on to some other software, I’m not sure I would be able to recover all the information from Lightroom. Second, suppose that I make a mistake in labeling some set of pictures. Will Lightroom allow some kind of batch relabeling? Third, suppose that I want to access the photos from some other software in addition to adobe products. I don’t think the other product would have access to the Lightroom information.
What I would really love is some way of entering this information in the file itself in a field such as author subject comment etc. However, I know of no software that allows quick and easy access to these fields, and most especially the ability to do batch replace edits on the fields (so that I can change “callicarpa Americana” to “callicarpa dichotoma Early Amethyst”). I don’t like xmp files which are far too easily separated from their base file.
As I said, I am just getting used to Lightroom, and I may well change my mind as I understand better how it works.
I should mention that I use Dopus, a file management system, which allows me to look at many folders at the same time, and makes it easy to do searches to find for example, all pictures taken in San Francisco or all photos taken at a certain time of year.
Thanks for your comments!
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4. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
nahcr Sep 30, 2012 7:17 PM (in response to Geoff the kiwi)My problem is that the folders already exist - I dont want to create them in Lightroom. I just want Lightroom to recognize them.
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5. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
richardplondon Oct 1, 2012 2:16 AM (in response to nahcr)Whenever an image is imported which lives in a particular folder, that folder will automatically appear in the LR Folders panel.
The Folders listed are NOT a browser representation of the various folders that the drive contains, and it is IMO vital to stop thinking of the LR interface in those terms. The Import screen is a kind of a browser window, but the Folders panel is not.
"Folders" is more of a dynamic readout, summarising all of the folders that your various imported images currently are known (or believed, or remembered) by Lightroom, to store themselves in.
Whenever LR's knowledge about that changes, this panel changes accordingly. But only when LR has some way of knowing about this.
When you change something inside the Folders panel which has a real implication for file storage (such as moving a file to another folder, or changing the name of a folder) then LR has to tell the operating system to carry that out. Here the OS is reporting back to LR that it cannot create a brand new folder (a folder of that name already exists, which the OS can see, even if LR currently does not). It is the OS which is complaining, naturally enough, that what you have told LR to do, cannot in this case be completed.
So: either rename / remove the folder outside LR so that you can then make a new one inside LR without any conflict;
or move the images into that folder outside LR, and then use "update folder location" inside LR in order to update and correct LR's knowledge about where these images are now located.
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6. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
EveryNameIsRejected Jul 30, 2013 6:28 AM (in response to richardplondon)It is only "vital to stop thinking" of lightroom folders the way the rest of the computer world continues to think of folders because lightroom unnecessarily forces it upon us.
It would be easy, and useful, for adobe to provide an option to show the full folder structure even when there are no pictures in the folder. Then we wouldn't have to go to explorer to check if a folder exists already (among other benefits).
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7. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
dj_paige Jul 30, 2013 6:37 AM (in response to EveryNameIsRejected)Whether you consider it "unnecessary" or not, the fact is that right now, Lightroom does not have this feature. I agree with RichardPLondon, you would be better off if you stopped thinking of folders in the way he described.
However, you can suggest new features at http://feedback.photoshop.com/
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that one to show up however. I see no evidence that Adobe wants to make Lightroom's workflow more "folder-friendly". I believe that the underlying concept of Lightroom is that you organize via keywords and other metadata, and not folders, and folders are just storage locations.
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8. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
EveryNameIsRejected Jul 30, 2013 6:52 AM (in response to dj_paige)Lightroom must run and be used within the OS environment, Windows in my case. So lightroom is one part of a larger system. Some folders are mixed purpose containing media, and documents, especially for multi-media projects that include Premiere Pro projects, After Effects etc.
I use lightroom even to organize photo/videos for a project that included Premiere for example, and it quickly becomes confusing when you have to check both Explorer and Lightroom to find folders, or to move images and video around to appropriate project folders. Premiere Pro projects need to have all Assets organized within the same project folder, or the entire project will become unusable once it is archived. Assets routinely begin there life either in a different project or not associated to a project. Lightroom offers a huge promise in organizing these things and the absence of the full folder structure adds unnecessary confusion.
Adding the full folder structure would go a long way towards integrating Lightroom with Production Premium suite of products.
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9. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
dj_paige Jul 30, 2013 7:03 AM (in response to EveryNameIsRejected)Well, make sure you submit a feature request.
Discussing it here won't make it happen.
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10. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
EveryNameIsRejected Jul 30, 2013 7:09 AM (in response to dj_paige)Just submitted it, thanks for the link!
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11. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
ssprengel Jul 30, 2013 7:53 AM (in response to EveryNameIsRejected)You seem to be using an elaborate folder structure for categorizing and rating your photos, a method that only has meaning to you, because you know how to interpret what you’ve done.
Likewise LR has keywording and stars/colors to categorize and rate photos that it stores into an internal database that only it knows how to interpret and because the data is inside a database, LR needs you to tell it what photos you want it to deal with, via the Import process.
An “empty folder” in LR is one that could be truly empty or one that LR has not had photos imported into itself from or one that contains media that LR doesn’t understand and therefore cannot have imported into itself. This would be dangerous to show in LR because you might want to delete the folder in LR based on what you saw in LR and it might not be empty, so you’d still have to go out and use Explorer to check before deleting things.
Basically the problem you’re having is you want a program like LR that has categorization and rating facilities built in to allow you to use your own, instead.
You think that allowing the viewing of non-imported folders in the Library file structure would fix this, but it has its own set of problems so Adobe chose not to do it.
If you want to continue to use your folder structure instead of LR to categorize and rate things, then use Bridge and ACR. The drawback of this is that you will need to store the actual photo adjustments in XMP files, which you say you don’t want. Even if keywords and ratings were stored within the photos, themselves, it still would be up to the program that stored this information to interpret it where there’s no standard for doing this, especially with raw-format photos that can have a different structure for each camera model.
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12. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
EveryNameIsRejected Jul 30, 2013 8:08 AM (in response to ssprengel)I use virtually all of the Lightroom catagorizing, rating, collections, key wording features. This works fine if you primarily do photos, with casual videos.
Lightroom can be used to organize diverse assets for Premiere and multi-media projects. Assets for Premiere Pro projects, for example, need to be kept together or the project will become unusable as soon as it is archived or moved anywhere. Often Assets need to be collected from multiple locations and gathered into the project. Lightroom is enormously helpful in finding those assets, particularly now that it handles videos. Adding the full Folder structure is not intended to replace the powerful organizing tools in lightroom, only to assist integrating Lightroom features with other adobe products like Premiere Pro.
As soon as you included non-photo based files in more complex projects, the full OS folder structure becomes really helpful within Lightroom.
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13. Re: lightroom 4 is not aware of empty folders
richardplondon Jul 30, 2013 11:18 AM (in response to EveryNameIsRejected)As soon as you included non-photo based files in more complex projects, the full OS folder structure becomes really helpful within Lightroom.
To be honest, once it is a question of non-photo assets, and the moment OS folders and files have some additional functional meaning to you beyond their ability to store the photos which LR is managing... then IMHO you enter into the proper realm of Bridge, not Lightroom.
Bridge's raison d'etre is not only to manage, but also to make things happen with these various kinds of data file (by pushing things out to working programs).
LR is both picture-centric, and inward-looking. It maintains a deliberately separate, selective and parallel reality; a "useful fiction" with respect to the actual contents of the storage medium.




