Creating Lightroom Collections from Folders by Dragging
The other day I needed to import into Lightroom a bunch of photos I'd already organized into subfolders in the Finder, so I simply dragged them into my Lightroom “originals” folder in the Finder, and synchronized that folder in Lightroom. My subfolders all showed up as expected… but of course I needed this same structure created in Collections, inside an already created Collection Set. I really didn't want to create a new collection, name it the same, drag the content, etc. etc. several times.
So I thought… “I wonder what would happen if I just dragged these Folders into the Collection Set?”.
And lo and behold, it actually worked!
And this is a real command; if you look at the Undo command, you'll see it listed as “Create Collection from Folder”.
I searched the menus and this doesn't seem to exist as a command, so only as something that happens when you drag (makes sense). Cool!
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Comments
on June 27, 2016 - 10:23pm
That's a handy tip! I wonder what happens if you drag a hierarchical “folder of folders” into Collections. Does it create a Collection Set with Collections inside?
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo
on June 28, 2016 - 8:50pm
I don't know… try it and let us know!
@PhotoJoseph
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on July 1, 2022 - 11:34pm
Is there a way to create Folders out of Collections ?
I’ve tried dragging collections over folders … no luck.
Maybe a plugin ?
Thanks !
ManaMana
on July 2, 2022 - 12:09am
You can select all images in a collection and drag-n-drop the thumbnails onto a folder and it should move all the selected images to that folder on disk. The Folders tool needs to show the folder so you can drop onto it.
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo
on July 2, 2022 - 3:21am
Thank you for pointing that out. I tend to keep most of the images in single project folder, but occasionally I move derivative files around. Should come handy.
I was hoping that if I drag a collection ( not a selection of photos ), LR will create a folder ( real disk drive folder ) with the name of the collection.
My workflow uses collections and some of the collections get reproduced manually for now in folders on the drive.
Thanks !
ManaMana