Right now, the path pattern used for events only works based on the name of the event, as well as the combined date of the contained images. Individual photo folders will use the individual dates of the photos, but are also restricted to dates.
We are thinking about how to best approach an automatic organization on a finer level (sub folders within an event or within an individual photo folder), but the details still need to be worked out. I’m seeing this as something to be tackled together with showing folders in the navigation panel and expect this to be solved within the same time frame.
Some related topics:
- Events folder flattens all photos even with a subfolder pattern
- Collections as folder structure field
- File renaming from metadata
For the server version, can you expand on the memory needs vs library size?
For a server process that has loaded three libraries with a total of around 200,000 files, I’m getting around 1.2 GB of memory usage while base memory usage with no library loaded is around 220 MB. This doesn’t always behave linearly and there may be some spikes during various activities, but as a minimum, having 1GB plus 1 GB per 200k photos available should be okay.
How far away is exposing sub-folders in the left pane?
It’s one of the features that is prioritized to fall roughly within the first 12 months after the 1.0.0 release.
As a scanned folder, or would it be better to create an empty library and importing there in steps?
I would definitely recommend starting with a scanned folder and then using the “event selector” (“Library” → “Mark Folders as Events…” in the menu bar) to determine which folders should be treated as events. With this approach, the events will stay in place for the time being (indicated by a little shortcut arrow icon) and the process is faster and more incremental.
We used to have a semi-automatic version of this as an import feature, but it turned out that the organization schemes different people use are just too diverse for that to work reliable enough.