Understanding how Avalanche for Luminar handles folders in the Luminar Library

Understanding how Avalanche for Luminar handles folders in the Luminar Library

Luminar uses the concept of synchronized folders. A picture added to Luminar can either be added as an individual edit or as part of a watched folder.

These folders appear in your Library Pane in Luminar 4:


How do we proceed in Avalanche?
We use both folders and individual edits, depending on the options chosen.

One of two situations can arise. Either:

  • The image is managed in the source catalog and will therefore be copied into the "Luminar Masters" folder during migration. "Luminar Masters" is added as a synchronized folder together with all its children.
      OR
  • The image is referenced in the source catalog. Whether it gets copied inside the "Luminar Masters" folder depends on the chosen output options (see Understanding the output options (from version 1.0.5) ). Those images that are not copied will stay in their original location and are added as individual images. We cannot add their parent folder, because any picture file that would live in the same folder would appear in Luminar, even if it was not part of the source catalog.

Let's look at some example:

Example 1 : Copying masters

In this example, we use an Aperture library of 80 images. We chose to copy all masters that were referenced into a new location. As a result all images are copied inside the "Luminar Masters" folder. In addition, we chose a Project-Year-Month-Day folder structure in Avalanche. The result in Luminar is as follows:


The "Luminar Masters" has been added to the folder list, and because Luminar shows the subfolder content for all added folders, the full Project / Year / Month / Day is reconstructed in your Luminar library using folders only. Eighty images are stored in the Luminar Masters folder.

Example 2: Leave masters as referenced files

We use the same library as above, but this time we choose to leave the masters in their origin folder.
The result in Luminar looks like this.


We have a Luminar Masters folder but it contains only 20 images. Why is that ?
If you look above, you'll notice that there is an album called "Masters duplicated by Avalanche". It is the album used by Avalanche to reference the duplicated masters that were needed in order to convert Virtual copies/versions (see  How does Avalanche for Luminar handle virtual copies ?). These duplicates were created in the " Luminar Masters" folder. There are 20 such duplicated masters. 
If you choose to reference all your masters and do not copy anything, you can end up with an empty Luminar Masters folder and all images in Luminar will be referenced as individual edits.


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