Lightroom Desktop: Import maintaining folder structure

Victoria, I appreciate that you’re trying to help but this kind of band-aiding is a problem. The problems with migration need to be solved more completely and thoroughly. I am having to rebuild my whole catalog right now due to the current crappy current situation and frankly terrible support from Adobe. We don’t need tricks...we need fixes.

What other kinds of issues are you having with migration, other than not reading the instructions before starting? 

There's no need to rebuild the catalog, even after migration you can still sync the collection membership from Classic, although you'd need to recreate the hierarchy.

I read everything I could find online and am a regular reader of your blog. I have tried numerous approaches and nothing has worked for me - thousands of photos are missing...photos that I can easily export from Lightroom CC...so I am halfway through a rebuild from scratch.

But this is all completely avoidable if Adobe were to provide relatively simple migration tools that pulled the catalog from one account and moved it to another. It would be trivial for their database folks to do this (I have some experience with database management) they just don’t want to do it.

I was also gravely misled by the online support team. The first person I spoke did not understand what was possible and wasted 2 hours while he disappeared up his own incompetent ass. I was transferred to someone else eventually who suggested some other things to try but nothing worked.

My point is that it should not be necessary to have all of these threads with these questions from confused and frustrated users. Adobe should fix the issues so it is simple to manage our photos between accounts.

I love everything else about this package and cannot see any app anywhere that mirrors it’s functionality...and I have looked at them all this week...so I am committed to spending hours exporting albums and re-uploading them. I just wish Adobe could get its head out of its butt on fixing this simple stuff.

• When I have new photos on a memory card, I use Copy/Add to import them into Lr and copy them to folders on my hard drive.
•  Within each of my main folders, I have dozens of subfolders, each of which can have dozens more -- sometimes 8-10 layers deep.  Here is an example of the minimum I end up with for just one event:

• I use star ratings to sort my photos and indicate the stages of editing until they are fully completed and ready to export into the two edited folders.
• For my client jobs, once they are done I upload their photos to albums on PhotoShelter. That typically happens very close to the event itself -- always within a week.
• BUT I mix in working on my personal projects as I have time and inclination. I don't need access to every single old photo I have at all times, but it would be nice.

• I hate the risk inherent to carrying around so many original files.
• I desperately need to use a cloud-based service (like Backblaze) as a triple backup, but that works only if I keep the hard drive plugged into my desktop so that the files can be synched periodically. That means I have to have one location with enough storage for all of my originals, and can't keep unplugging an external drive to move it back and forth.

• If you only needed 2560px smart previews, I'd say sync the collections you're going to need from the Classic catalog and put CC on your laptop for editing. That's the clean automatic simple route, but wouldn't give you full res on your laptop, so Photoshop editing would be out.
• If LRCC has all the tools you need, apart from folder management, this might be a silly idea, but have you considered employing a teenager for a few hours to do the work of converting your folder structure into an album structure? It's a one-time job, as you'd put new photos directly into CC, so would be the cleanest solution.
• There are very unofficial workarounds for getting originals to the Adobe cloud and continuing to use Classic, but they'd still require you to rebuild your folder structure as albums/folders.
• Otherwise, you're down to non-Adobe-cloud solutions, like putting the catalog and photos on an external drive, and using file sync software (like Chronosync) to keep it copied back another external drive permanently hooked up to your iMac, so it can get into your Backblaze backup and you're not risking your originals by carrying around your only copy. 

I have migrated the my Lightroom Classic catalogue to Lightroom and  all my folders are missing. I understand that for the import to happen correctly thee folder names must be created into collections, but I only realised this after the migration was complete. Is there a way to remigrate the catalogue? Its about 20.000 photos that I hope that I wont have to reorganise. Thank you.

All your folders are marked as missing? That would suggest your originals are gone or moved, but the migration wouldn't have done that... any idea what would have happened?

In your Classic catalog, if you convert the folders to collections, reenable sync and mark each of the collections to sync, then the collections themselves would sync to the cloud, but you'd need to manually recreate any hierarchy as that only transfers during a migration.

If you'd like to tell us the kind of problems you're having, perhaps in a new thread, we'll be pleased to help you sort it out.