Adding a Missing Parent Folder to a Lightroom Folder
When you import existing images from your hard drive into Lightroom, the folder with the files in it is listed in the Folders panel in Lightroom. However, if that folder is inside of another folder, the parent folder is most likely not listed.
Here’s what I mean. My system is to have one main folder or hard drive that contains all photos. Inside of that I have a subfolder for every year. Each of the year subfolders contains folders for photo shoots from that year. In Figure 1 you can see this diagrammed. The Smith shoot folder is in the 2010 folder, which inside of the main Photos folder.
The folder structure as shown in the Mac Finder
If the Smith folder is imported into Lightroom, any subfolders inside of it are also imported, but it’s 2010 parent folder isn’t. Because of that, the 2010 folder and its parent folder (Photos) are not listed in the Folders Panel, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Parent folders are missing in Lightroom
These missing folders make it more difficult to keep track of your hard drive organizational structure in Lightroom. Their absence also prevents you from being able to do things like filter or synchronize the entire parent folder.
Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. If you want to see a folder’s parent folder, all you have to do is right click on the folder and choose Add Parent Folder. If you’re using a Mac without right-clicking enabled, Ctrl+click on the folder to get the same contextual menu.
In this case, after the 2010 folder becomes visible, I right-click on it to add its parent folder; Photos. Figure 3 shows the updated listing in the Lightroom Folders panel.
Figure 3: Now the parent folders are available
This procedure is especially useful if you like to store folders temporarily on your Desktop. After Desktop is displayed in the Folders panel, you’ll be able to better keep track of those folders because it will be obvious that they’re still on the Desktop.
