Here’s a question I got this week:

“I have many duplicates of photos on my hard drive and in Lightroom.  If I click on All Photographs (or some subset) and sort by capture date, I can see the duplicates side by side, but I can’t figure out how to easily see which folder each of the duplicates are in, so I can decide which to delete and which to keep. I know I could right-click on a photo and choose Go to Folder in Library to jump to the folder, but I don’t want to jump to it, I just want to know what it is.  Is there an easy way?”  Kathy

Lightroom to the rescue!

For this type of work, I recommend displaying the folder name above your image thumbnails, along with file name, capture date and time, and copy name. Go to Grid view (G) in the Library module, then up in the menu bar, View > View Options.  Set “Show Grid Extras” to Expanded Cells.  Then down in the Expanded Cell Extras section, choose these four fields.

Lightroom set view options for grid view
Now I can see that this photo is in my 11-04 Zion National Park folder, as well as what the file name is and the capture date and time:

lightroom-display-folder-name

If this photo were a virtual copy, I would see a “copy name” to the right of the folder name. For more on using the Copy Name field to document your virtual copies, see this post.

If seeing the folder name isn’t enough and you want to see the whole folder hierarchy, you can open up the Metadata panel (bottom right in the Library module), and hover over the Folder name field:

lightroom-folder-hierarchy

 

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