Adobe Lightroom

The Folders panel may be one of the most used panels in all of Lightroom, but it may also be one of the least understood. There’s actually quite a bit of functionality in this little panel, and with the addition of the Volume Browser in Lightroom 2 it puts quite a bit of data at your fingertips. Let’s take a closer look at this panel and how to use it to help manage your photos and keep tabs on your drives.

One of the most important distinctions to make is that the Folders panel is not a file browser. You will only see folders that have actually been through the import process. Just like the photos that reside within them, nothing appears in Lightroom unless it was imported first.

The Folders panel consists of two elements—Folders and the new Volume Browser. Folders are exactly that, the folders on your hard drive(s) that you have imported into Lightroom. You can import any number of folders and subfolders, and they will always be sorted alphanumerically. Subfolders will “nest” under their parent folders, which mirror the structure you see in your file browser (i.e. Finder or Windows Explorer) when looking at your disk because they are one and the same set of folders.

In this next screen capture you can see I have two Volume Browsers labeled Local and sparta. Local is my internal drive and sparta is an external drive. These are the names I gave these drives on my Mac. On Windows, you’ll also see the relevant drive letter. This aspect alone is a real benefit because in Lightroom 1 it can be difficult to tell which drive your folders were located on.

With a glance at the Volume Browser I can tell a few things about my drives. First, the Local drive shows a green indicator, which means that the drive has ample free space. In fact, it shows that 71.6 GB out of 185 GB are free.

Second, I can see that sparta is offline since it displays a gray indicator and the name is faded out. Since it’s offline Lightroom can’t display how much free space it may have. The color indicator will turn orange as the free space gets low, then red when the disk is full.

Free space isn’t the only information the Volume Browser reveals. If you right-click (Mac: Ctrl-click) the Volume Browser, you can choose to display Disk Space, Photo Count, Status, or nothing at all. In addition, you can open that disk in Windows Explorer or Finder and even access information about that disk.

Another nice aspect of the Volume Browser is that it’s collapsible, which makes the Folders panel much easier to navigate, especially if you have multiple drives with multiple folders on each. The previous captures showed both of my volumes collapsed, but once they are expanded I can see my folder structure underneath.

Remember, you will only see imported folders displayed in the Folders panel. I find it preferable to always import the top-level or parent folder that contains all the subfolders where my photos stored. This provides the benefit of being able to collapse that group of subfolders so the list doesn’t run on forever, and it makes it much easier to move that entire tree of folders to a new drive if necessary just by dragging and dropping the top level folder.

Don’t worry if you haven’t imported your top-level folder because a new feature of Lightroom 2 makes it a snap. Just right-click (Mac: Ctrl-click) a folder and choose Add Parent Folder. The parent folder will automatically appear in the folders panel with all the subfolders nested underneath.

Along the same line, if you have a folder you want to remove from Lightroom, you can right-click (Mac: Ctrl-click) that folder and choose Remove. This won’t delete the folder from your disk, but rather just remove it from the Lightroom catalog. If the folder you’re removing has subfolders, Lightroom will ask you if you want to Promote Subfolders or Remove Entire Folder. Promote Subfolder will just remove the top-level folder from the Folders panel and leave all subfolders. Remove Entire Folder takes away the top-level folder and any subfolders.

Stay tuned for future installments that cover the differences in how Lightroom 2 handles moving folders and reconnecting to missing folders and photos.