Today’s Question: As best I can remember I’ve never used “Remove from Lightroom” when deleting, but rather always use “Delete from Disk”. But that’s not to say I may not have photos in any number of folders that were either removed from Lightroom Classic or never imported. Do you think it would be reasonable to select my top-level folder (called Photos) and synchronize all subfolders to “clean up” all my photo folders?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can most certainly use the Synchronize Folder command to check for any photos that are in your overall folder structure but that are not currently in your Lightroom Classic catalog.
More Detail: Among other things, the Synchronize Folder command in Lightroom Classic can be used to see if there are any photos in a folder on your hard drive that are not represented in the catalog. Any such photos can then be added to the catalog as part of this process. This command can be used on a top-level (or parent) folder, because it will scan subfolders as part of the synchronization.
To get started you can right-click on a folder in the Folders list on the left panel in the Library module and choose “Synchronize Folder” from the popup menu. The folder can be an individual folder you want to check, or a top-level folder for your overall photo storage, for example.
The Synchronize Folder dialog will appear, and your photo storage will be analyzed. If there are photos somewhere within the folder structure you selected for synchronization, the “Import new photos” checkbox will be turned on, with a number in parenthesis indicating how many photos were found. Keep this checkbox turned on and also turn on the “Show import dialog before importing” checkbox.
If either the “Remove missing photos from catalog” or “Scan for metadata updates” checkboxes are enabled, turn them off. If these issues exist, they should be dealt with separately from adding unaccounted for photos to the catalog.
Click the Synchronize button, and the Import dialog will appear (assuming you turned on the checkbox for that). You can configure the settings for import as you’d like, but in particular I recommend leaving the option at the top-center set to “Add” and that you turn off the “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” checkbox turned off. Normally you would want to exclude duplicate images from being imported, but in this context I recommend adding even duplicate photos to the catalog so that all images are accounted for within the catalog. You can then identify and evaluate duplicate images to see if there are any that should be deleted.
With the settings for import configured, you can click the Import button at the bottom-right of the Import dialog to add the discovered photos to the catalog.
