Infratech Civil

Product:  Adobe Lightroom Classic  |   Subject: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic

In this exercise, we will learn about Adobe Lightroom Classic Folders and Moving Photos Inside Lightroom.

In this section, I want to share some techniques that you can use in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom that will cause you to manipulate the files on your hard drive. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom isn't quite a file manager, in the same way, Adobe bridges. But any photos that you import into the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom catalog as we've done here can be manipulated and moved around in the file system. 

However, before you do this, I highly recommend you take extreme caution because you can mess up the file system structure and potentially lose some of your images. I'm sharing this with you because sometimes you may already have organized your file system in the way you like. But maybe sometimes you want to go in and make a few adjustments. This is what you can do using these steps. What you're going to do here is you're going to work within the left panel in the Folder View. And what we're going to do right now is work with that existing image catalog that we have. It's called New minimal. As you know, we've imported 100 different images from this folder that exists here.

It's called images. What we want to do is, when we take a look at our catalog, we see animals, we see portraits, we see a few other things that perhaps maybe should go into their folders. So what are we going to do? Well, first off, I like to work with portraits. So I'm just going to right-click here. 

I'm going to create a folder inside images. I'm going to call this folder portraits. 

What this means is that it's going to be put inside the existing folder images. We're not going to click include selected photos just yet, but we're just going to create an empty folder called portraits. So what you're going to see within this original folder that has all 100 of your photos will be another folder that we created. That's called portraits. 

Let me show you what I mean by that in the file system. So I'm here. So this is the folder images that we imported all of our photos. 

Now Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, we created a new folder called portraits. 

So we're manipulating the file system to create a subfolder underneath the main folder of images that we're going to put our portraits into. Now that we've created the portraits folder within the images folder, we will move each of the portrait photos into the newly created portraits folder. To do this:

1. We select that first portrait,  

1. Next, let’s go over the portraits folder that we just created. 
2. Then right click on it, and choose to move the selected photo to this folder. 
3. Now Lightroom will throw up a warning in saying it's going to move a file on disk, and it says it's going to cause the corresponding file on disk to be moved. If you proceed, neither this movement nor any change you've made before this can be undone. 
4. So you can, of course, click to don't show again so that you know what you're doing now, or you can keep it and then select to move.

So what we've done is we've moved this photo now into the portraits folder. So if we select the portraits folder, we'll see that it contains only one photo. The main parent folder has a total of 100 images, which also includes the one image in the portraits that we just added. 

That's why it's still in the catalog up here. Let's go ahead and add all of the photos that we think should be part of the photos there. I'm now selecting multiple photos by holding the Ctrl key on my windows keyboard and just clicking each of the photos that I think should go into the portraits folder. And I'm just going to leave the wedding photos alone for now. And then we're going to go and click this one here. And this one. Alright, so from this, you can see that we've selected 27 of the remaining 99 photos. 

We're just going to right click here again and then move the selected photos to this folder will throw that warning dialog to me again, and I'm going to select to move it, and you will see that it's moving all the files.

In total, in the portraits folder that we just created, we've moved 28 different photos within it. One of the reasons I wanted to show you this is to show you that Lightroom is versatile. In this sense, you can create a file structure on the hard drive and manipulated it using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The only thing is all of these photos have to be imported into the catalog in the first place. Let me show you what it looks like on the file system. So I'm going to show you these photos here. Do you remember we used to have 100 photos in the images folder? Then we created that portraits folder, and now that has another 28 photos that are all portraits, and of course, this is reflected here in the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom catalog. We have 100 images in total. 

But we also have an additional 28 portraits within the portraits folder. I hope this has helped you manipulate some of your file system structures using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The only thing is you have to have made sure you imported all the photos into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom in the first place before you can do this kind of manipulation. Of course, you can create as many folders as you'd like. And you can move each of the appropriate photos that you want from your main catalog into the newly created folders. I hope this has been helpful, and if you do have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out.