# How can you move multiple folders at once?



## doac00 (Jul 29, 2009)

This may be a silly question but an issue I cannot find much about. I know the majority of folk will use a flat folder structure and I'm one of them but when it comes to then streaming the photos a structure of some kind is useful even if lightroom doesn't need one. 
So basically I have hundreds of folders with date stamps (day-month-year) used for their name and I want to add a top level folder, like the year only and move all the folders up into this one without having to do it one at a time - then I may do monthly ones as sub-folders under this if needs be. I itterate again this is not for my use during lightroom as metadata finds photos way quicker then searching folders but for when I desire to stream to my TV and then search for what I want to show as this doesn't understand metadata but just plain old folder structure.

Anybody know why I seem not able to move multiple folders at a time? Is there a work round?? is LR addressing this issue with other updates/versions???

Cheers for looking and repying.


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## Anti (Jul 29, 2009)

Anybody know why I seem not able to move multiple folders at a time?

Just to confirm - if you select multiple folders in LR and drag them to a
now location, LR does only move the first one.

&gt; Is there a work around??

Sorry, no idea. You could move them using the OS instead, but then I think LR will still only find one folder at a time, which is no better than moving them one at a time.

Syncronise would do the whole lot at once, but *I think* you'd lose your metadata and edits - the images would be imported fresh, as new images; all your existing ones would be deleted, including their metadata. *But I might be wrong about that* - I'd actually like to know the answer to this one too.


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## clee01l (Jul 29, 2009)

I don't know if this is a 'bug' or a 'feature', but LR will only move one folder at a time. Even trying to take advantage of the multithreaded capability, when I try to move one folder and then drag a second folder I get a warning about only one move operation at a time. 

Since we are talking about OS I/O operations, it does not matter whether you set up a move of several or do the move one at a time. the time involved ill be the same for it will always be a serial opertion to the OS.


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## Kiwigeoff (Jul 29, 2009)

LR will only move one folder at a time. I don't remember the reasoning for this right now but that is the way it is!!


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## Anti (Jul 30, 2009)

So is there answer to what the OP is trying to do?

If the OS is used to move multiple folders and rename them,
how will lightroom react when it is started up?

Will it intelligently and automatically be able to re-build the catalog?
Or does the user need to 'find' every folder manually?

Should the 'syncronise' feature be used, or would all adjustments then be lost?

Thanks for any input.


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## Sean McCormack (Jul 30, 2009)

I've been moving a lot of folders around recently, sometimes in Lightroom, sometimes in the OS.

To make sure your settings are transferable, select all the images you're moving and hit Control/Command S to save out metadata. That way if you move the files with the OS, the settings will move with them. 

If the folders you want to move have the parent folder, you could try right clicking on one of the folders and choosing 'Add Parent Folder', then move this file. I'm not sure what happens to files that are in these folders, but not in Lightroom (I will investigate though).

You can move the files in the OS and then click on the ? on the thumbnail cell when Lightroom discovers they're missing. Clicking Find Nearby photos will relink other photos in the folder, but you'll pretty much have to do this for each folder.. It's tedious. 

I moved most of my folders in Lightroom, in the end it was less tedious. I have spoken to the team about this in the past and they seemed keen to have multiple folder operation available.


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## Victoria Bampton (Jul 30, 2009)

But [quote author=Sean McCormack link=topic=7386.msg5'435#msg5'435 date=1248911526]
To make sure your settings are transferable, select all the images you're moving and hit Control/Command S to save out metadata. That way if you move the files with the OS, the settings will move with them. 
[/quote]

But remember not all data is saved to the xmp in the files - Develop history, flags, collection memberships are the main bits that would get lost if you removed the images from the catalog and reimported in their existing locations.


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## doac00 (Jul 30, 2009)

Thanks folks - it seems the concensus is that you can only move one at a time until Adobe put this ability into LR.

Parent folder work around only works if your folders are not already sub-folders, like mine.

Working in LR is better than at OS.

I'll live with it as I'll only have to do it this one time for now. I would not bother with it as I'd actively use smart collections but it's for when I'm NOT in LR but wanting to stream the photos to a TV with a media streamer (they only know folder structures).

So with that said I hope they put this useful feature into LR in the future, because the package itself is top notch.


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## Bagpuss (Jan 27, 2010)

Hello, 
is there any advance on this issue? It's a nightmare moving folders around in LR, or else easy to move them elsewhere and then a nightmare telling LR where they all are again! Either way, it's a nightmare!
Why can't this seemingly simple thing be addressed?


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## Kiwigeoff (Jan 28, 2010)

What are you trying to do exactly. With my folder structure I rarely have any reason to move one and even rarer to want to do it outside of LR.


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## Victoria Bampton (Jan 28, 2010)

Bagpuss, welcome to the forum!

And I move folders around all the time and haven't run into problems, so whichever way you go, you'll still need to tell us a bit more so we can save you the headache.


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## Bagpuss (Jan 29, 2010)

Hello, thanks for the welcome!

Reason: I often import from the camera into LR on my MacBookPro when I'm out and about or travelling. When I return to base, I want to transfer them onto my external FW8'' drive.

Obviously moving one folder in Lightroom is no problem, and my preferred method, as LR still knows where they are etc. But if I've got several days or even weeks worth of folders (a dozen, say), I can't move them all together. As reported, one can select multiple folders but when one drags them to the new location, only the first in the list is moved.

As such, one has to make a dozen moves, instead of one. This is made worse by LR screwing around with the view of the folders once it's completed the move, requiring more scrolling around to find the source/destination folders another 11 times!

I know one can move folders in Finder and then tell LR where they've gone, but that's not foolproof, and even then one ends up doing "locate missing folders/files" a bunch of times.

If I can select multiple photos in grid view and move them all to another folder in one go, why not multiple folders?

Thanks!


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## clee01l (Jan 30, 2010)

[quote author=Bagpuss link=topic=7386.msg61161#msg61161 date=12648'9387]Reason: I often import from the camera into LR on my MacBookPro when I'm out and about or travelling. When I return to base, I want to transfer them onto my external FW8'' drive.[/quote] alsoI keep two drives active in LR. One is my local drive where I keep my current work. The other drive ia a NAS drive and anything older than about 3 months is migrated there. While I can appreciate your problem, I think you should adapt as I have done and not worry too much about it. As I said, about once a month I move I move up to 3' Date Named folders from the local drive to the Archive Drive. While it can be tedious, I usually do it as a spare time task. LR will happily move folders in the background while I'm Picking or rejecting images in another folder, Updating metadata/keywords or in the Develop module. As I write this, I am moving my October 2''9 folders to archive, picking images from a smart collection for a talk that I have coming up and cleaning up some folders that have undeleted culls.


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## Victoria Bampton (Jan 30, 2010)

1 tip then... they'll move a million times quicker if you start the move and then click on an empty folder, as it's not having to redraw the thumbnails.

But yes, moving multiple folders in one go would be a great addition. Of course, adding them under a parent folder and then dragging the parent folder saves that one, but I'm not sure how well that'd work for you in this scenario.


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## clee01l (Jan 30, 2010)

[quote author=Victoria Bampton link=topic=7386.msg61172#msg61172 date=1264839373]... Of course, adding them under a parent folder and then dragging the parent folder saves that one...[/quote]While this might make the task easier on the user, it is still a serial move, one file at a time. And a limitation forced by the constraints of the OS. It will not be any faster, just require less user intervention.


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## Bagpuss (Jan 31, 2010)

Thanks for all the tips. If anything, it's good to know that it can't be done, and it's not just that I don't know how to do it.

All very boring and I can't for the life of me think why, when the rest of the programme is so good and so powerful, it's not possible!

Maybe someone who can influence it will read this....


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## albanmews (Jul 6, 2010)

Moving multiple folders one at a time requires the user to sit at the computer while do so. A multiple move capability would enable users to leave it running while off doing other things. This is a HUGE difference! I hope Adobe recognizes some of us have other things to do than operate its software all day - especially for such trivial tasks that software could easily handle.


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## Karayuschij (Jul 7, 2010)

[quote author=albanmews link=topic=7386.msg69887#msg69887 date=1278421364]
Moving multiple folders one at a time requires the user to sit at the computer while do so. A multiple move capability would enable users to leave it running while off doing other things. This is a HUGE difference! I hope Adobe recognizes some of us have other things to do than operate its software all day - especially for such trivial tasks that software could easily handle.
[/quote]

I completely agree with you, having to move the folders one at a time is a huge lost of time. Adobe should give the possibility to the users to move more folders at a time. And then the users could be free to use it or not, according to their own preferences…


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## clee01l (Jul 7, 2010)

Why are you moving folders at all? It not like this is something you do all the time. I do it once a month to move older images off my local drive to a network drive where they will be available if I need to access them again. Looking at April's folder list (the next month I'll be moving), I have 15 folders and ~35' images. I'll move them one day folder at a time, but I won't set around waiting on one to finish. I'll be in Develop mode post- processing the latest import. The Task runs in the background and is transparent to all other operations except another folder move. The whole month might take 3' minutes but I won't be unproductive during the time LR is moving folders


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## linkwoman (Oct 27, 2010)

Moving multiple folders at once would be a GREAT feature. Having used lightroom for 1' months now, I realize now that I have images on 2' or so days a month. I have them in the 2'1'/2'1'-'1-'1 structure which looks like this for example:
2'1'/2'1'-1'-'1
2'1'/2'1'-1'-'3
2'1'/2'1'-1'-'5
....
2'1'/2'1'-1'-12
...
2'1'/2'1'-1'-26

see? Now I realize how much I'm scrolling to get to previous months; I'm going to have like 3'' folders at the same level for a year. 

I should have seen this coming but didn't. It happens. Obviously it won't happen twice (to me! ) Now, I'd like to insert month folders as parents of all the day folders in each month so that collapsed I have 12 folders for the year, like this:

&gt;2'1'
&gt;2'1'-'1
&gt;2'1'-'2
&gt;2'1'-'3

I've changed my import setting to use the new structure: 2'1'/2'1'-1'/2'1'-'1-'1
so all new imports are going into that structure. 

I am shocked that you can't move multiple folders at once in LR. Moving folders in LR is obviously better than moving them in the OS for many reasons (I tried that, and the resynching and finding missing photos was even more tedious), so I guess I'm resigned to moving about 25' folders one by one unless anyone else has a better idea.

thanks.

~Darby


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## sizzlingbadger (Oct 27, 2010)

This is one of the areas that Lightroom certainly lacks in functionality. I recently wanted to do something similar to you. It took me several mind numbing hours in LR to move all my folders and clean up. It took about 2 minutes in Aperture to do it with the relocate masters option. A Feature request to Adobe would help


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## johnbeardy (Oct 27, 2010)

I agree - it's horrible. But even 2 minutes via a somewhat obscure (and to many frightening) command is too much. One should have drag and drop of multiple folders, which would take seconds, and also a "cut and paste" method. This applies to keywords as well, but have you ever tried dragging and dropping when the list is more than a few lines long?

John


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## linkwoman (Oct 27, 2010)

Ok I just posted the idea to https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform and hope you all will too!


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