Organize albums within folders

- [Instructor] Over time you can accumulate quite a few albums and that can really clutter up your sidebar here. First we're looking at something called folders and we can store our albums in there, organize our albums, and it really does save space. I'm going to show you how that works right now. So I'm going to create a folder to hold my smart albums because I like smart albums, probably going to end up with a bunch of them, so I'm going to go up to File, New Folder. And I'm going to give it a name, let's call it Smart Albums hit Return.

Now all I have to do is drag my smart albums into the folder, and I can do that here, or I can do that down here. Let's just see how good my dragging skills are today. There's one, (laughs). I shouldn't have said anything right? (laughs) I can do it down here, let's do it down here (laughs). Alright so drag, there we go, now I'm cooking right. Get it in there, so you just drag it til it highlights, then you can let go.

Okay so there we go. So let's go back here, so here are my smart albums right here. Two star images, three star images, edited three stars, and raw files. And I can organize within so I can move that around and get it exactly the way that I want. Now the cool thing about this, having this folder is that I can collapse it, look at that, and save all this space. So you can imagine all the opportunities with folders.

You could have folders for years or for topics, subject matter, all sorts of things, and then put a whole bunch of albums in there and then collapse them and open them as needed. It really helps keep your sidebar very tidy here. Now there's one thing that I want to warn you about though, this is to me a little surprising with folders, if I decide that I want to delete this folder, I would just hold down the Control key and choose Delete Folder, I'm going to get a warning message and this is a warning message you want to pay attention to because if you delete the folder, the application will delete the albums that are inside.

Now you won't lose your photos, but you will lose all the work that you've done creating those albums. I don't really understand why it works that way, it seems like the folder should just go away and the albums should spread out back flat again, but they don't, they go away. So you have a couple different options if you decide that you need to make a change to a folder. Your first inclination might be to delete it, but maybe instead go ahead and cancel, we don't want to do that. But maybe instead, hold down the Control key, will changing its name work, maybe you can just do that.

If that won't work and you really do want to get rid of that folder then what you need to do is drag all the albums out of it so they're back down here flat, make sure the folder is empty and then delete it after it's empty. Other than that, they're great but that's just one thing you really should know about that if you delete a folder, it will delete the albums inside. Your pictures will be safe, but you will lose the work that you invested in creating those albums. So folders, a really big library I think are very handy and will help you keep the sidebar nice and tidy.