Today’s Question: Can you explain why you recommend leaving the “Rename parent folder” checkbox turned off when renaming a catalog within Lightroom Classic? Wouldn’t you want the folder name to match the catalog name?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Leaving the “Rename parent folder” checkbox turned off when renaming a catalog is simply a precaution. As long as you’re sure there aren’t any photos stored in the same folder as the catalog you can indeed rename the folder along with the catalog.
More Detail: In Monday’s newsletter I addressed a question about the Lightroom Classic catalog having a filename that didn’t match the current version of Lightroom Classic. As part of my answer I explained how you can now easily rename the catalog, thanks to a new feature Adobe recently added.
In that answer I mentioned that I recommend keeping the “Rename parent folder” checkbox turned off. But this was really just out of an abundance of caution, and I certainly understand that many photographers might want to have the folder containing the catalog have the same name as the catalog itself.
The issue is that if you happen to have photos that are being managed by the catalog stored in the same folder as the catalog, then renaming the catalog parent folder will cause all folders and photos stored within that parent folder to appear as missing in Lightroom Classic. That’s because renaming the parent folder would cause the path to the photos to change, so the catalog would no longer be pointing to the right location.
For example, one of my readers had consolidated his overall storage so that his primary photo folder (and therefore all the folders containing all his photos) was in the same folder as the catalog. When he renamed the parent folder as part of the process of renaming the catalog, every single folder and photo was suddenly missing in Lightroom Classic. Reverting the name of the parent folder where the catalog was stored solved the issue.
Most photographers don’t store any of their photos in the same folder as the catalog. But if you do, renaming the folder that contains the catalog would cause problems. So, as long as you’re sure that all your photos and their respective folders are in a storage location other than the folder containing the catalog, you can most certainly turn on the “Rename parent folder” checkbox in the dialog for renaming the catalog (accessed from the menu at File > Rename Catalog) so that the folder containing your catalog will be renamed to match the name you are renaming the catalog to.
