Reorganising folders in Lightroom

I’ve always been a little slack with my photo folders organisation. My normal procedure is I come back from a photo outing with maybe 30 to 40 images; I’m not one for machine gun type photography. The images are imported from the card to an internal hard disk via lightroom 3.6.
I name the folder by the area that I have visited, such as Assynt or Glencoe; all the images on the card go into that folder.

 The problem with this is that if you take photos from another area, such as an interesting landscape that you see on route the name of the folder becomes meaningless.

All my images go onto one disk which only holds photos, that way the disk is never affected by operating system problems which necessitates a reformat.

The disk contains images going back to 2001 and was a mess. The time had come to do a complete reorganisation and Lightroom has all the tools to do this.

I could have gone through each folder in turn and put them into date order and rename them, I didn’t fancy the brain work involved in that.

I decided to let Lightroom do the majority of the work for me and at the same time transfer the images to a new disk.

I made a folder on the new disk ( Lightroom would normally use the default location for this which is in your my Pictures folder on “C” disk). I called this My photo library , inside this folder I made two new folders  one  I called  New lightroom  catalogue and the other Photos

The new Lightroom catalogue had no images in it as yet. I started the import process, I selected the old disk as the source and the new photos folder within my new photo library folder as the destination. I selected Copy photos to a new location and add to catalogue. As I was importing nearly 10,000 images I selected Render minimal previews in file handling to speed the process up, I would render Standard  previews at another  time I also took the opportunity to winkle out any duplicate files by selecting don’t import suspected duplicates .

In Destination I selected Organise by date I choose to have all the images  go into individual day folders within a year folder. So I selected Year/ month-day. The forward slash is important here because that denotes a separate folder. So I would get a year folder and within that folder each day’s images would go into a day folder.

All that remained was to press Import. I hadn’t prepared myself for the time it would take to copy the files to another disk, my 10,000 images took just over two days. Maybe if I had been just moving the images within the same disk it would have been a lot quicker.

I ended up with all the images in their respective date folders

2005
        01-01

        02-01
        02-02
        02-03
        03-01
        03-02

Etc,etc

Lightroom did all this for me but to make it a little more organised I went through each folder and added a name after the folder date.

ie
01-02 assynt.

I could name as many folder assynt as I wanted because the date would always be different.

I now have a tidy folder structure and as long as I import using the same criteria new images will slot in tidily.