How to Consolidate Two Folders in a Catalog that Point to the Same Location?

Question

I have one Lightroom Catalog with two top level folders. Both folders point to the same physical network storage location with the difference being that one folder uses the UNC path while the other uses a mapped drive. So it looks something like this in the Library Module:

Multimedia (\\192.168.1.3) (M:)  1297 Photos
\\192.168.1.3\Multimedia        17135 Photos

This happened because I imported using a mapped drive instead of the UNC path.

I want the mapped drive content to be located under the UNC folder so everything is under the same top level folder. Also, because I didn't notice the issue at first I made adjustments to some of the mapped drive photos and (ideally) I don't want to lose any adjustments that were made.

Answer 1

There is not much that Lightroom will let you do to the top level folder so here is the procedure I used.

For all child folders of the mapped drive folder (Multimedia (\192.168.1.3) (M:) 1297 Photos):

• Right click and select "Update Folder Location"
• Select the UNC folder \IP\Multimedia... location that is the same as the selected folder location
• Lightroom will prompt so agree to Merge the folders

After that all files were located under the UNC top level folder.

This worked for me. Luckily I had organized by year so I only had a few top level folders but if there were many folders this could have been more of a painful process.

Answer 2

One of the possible ways is:

• Write your tags into metadata for the folder with 1297
• Import the above folder using UNC path. Lightroom will pick up metadata from these files when importing.
• If all is Ok, remove the first folder from the catalog