In this short tutorial, Joe Houghton addresses a common Lightroom issue where top‑level month folders display "no photos" because the images are stored in subfolders and Lightroom is not set to roll up those counts. He demonstrates the problem using a 2022 folder structure with missing counts for November and August, then walks through the simple fix: open the Folders panel, click the down‑arrow next to the plus sign, and enable the "Show Photos in Subfolders" option. Once checked, Lightroom instantly updates the folder view to show the correct image totals. The video serves as a quick, practical guide for Lightroom users to ensure their folder counts are accurate.
Chapters
Hi, this is Joe Houghton, and here's another Lightroom Bite for you. Just come off a one-to-one with a friend of mine, Chris, and he'd called me because he had a problem where he had lost his photos. So I just thought it might make an interesting little Lightroom Bite. So if you have a look over on the left-hand side of the screen here, I've set the folders up to show something like what Chris was having his problem with. So I've got 2022 here and it's showing no pictures. And, you know, we've got the different months and you can see that, like, in November we went to a wedding and there's 745 images in the wedding folder underneath. But you would normally have then the November folder above it showing There were 745 shots in the folder. And where you've got multiple shoots in a month, like here, Skerries, for instance, and then the wonderful barn and first day of school, we should be showing, what, 148 images up in August? But we're not doing. And when I click on that, it's saying no photos in selected folder. Okay, well, there aren't because they're all in the subfolders. But what we would normally see in Lightroom is we'd see the counts rolled up to the top folders. And if for some reason you're not seeing those counts, then here's how you fix it. It's very simple, but it's not necessarily very intuitive. You go up to where it says Folders, and next to the plus there is a tiny little down arrow, and you want to click on that. And in this little box that pops up, Show Photos in Subfolders, you need to just click on that to put a check mark next to it. And all of a sudden, all our counts are back for our folders on the left-hand side. Okay, so it's as simple as that. So go up to Folders, click on the little down arrow, and make sure that Show Photos in Subfolders has got a check mark on it. There, that was a quick one. See you next time.
