davidc wrote:Isn't organising the photos into a year and month based folder model not the same as, well, an outdated folder model?
Technically you are correct, as Lightroom has to work with the file structures supported by the underlying operating system. A few years ago, as part of the ill fated Longhorn development which eventually became Vista, Microsoft had grandiose plans which it could not ultimately deliver to update the file system. As a result we are stuck with NTFS which was introduced as part of Windows NT and dates back at least to the 1990s. Its origins might possibly predate that as NT is based on an operating system which begain its life at DEC in the 1980s. Whether any of this applies to OSX I would not know as I am not at all au fait with that platform.
Personally, I find the LR default sensible as I can usually remember when I took my more recent images, so I can easily find them in the folder structure if I want to. Otherwise, I tend to rely on LR's other tools or use a combination if I know the year when I took a shot, but not the precise date for example.
davidc wrote:Lightroom confuses me sometimes because half my images are in the year > month location and the rest are wherever they were first copied to my laptop. Lightroom is very inconsistent with where the catalogue chooses to keep files, to the point where I move some from one folder and it happens that lightroom loses the link. As a content management tool I am not that impressed.
It sounds to me as though you are not managing your images entirely in Lightroom. If you copy images from your memory card to your hard drive and do not use the LR import function, LR will leave them where they are by default and all that gets updated is the catalogue which records the images' location when you do eventually import them. You can change this by changing the default behaviour from "Add" to "Copy" when doing the import, in which case you will end up with two copies of the files but LR will not reference the original version. When importing from a card, LR changes its default to "Copy" which is normally what is required and there is also a "Move" function which will delete the files at the original location. If you change the location of files outside of LR, the catalogue cannot keep track of what happened, knowing only that the files are no longer present. In which case it displays the question mark symbol and will attempt to find the images in their new position when you click it. If you have deleted the files externally, naturally LR will not be able to find them in this instance.
To return an earlier compliment, this appears to be a case of PEBKAC rather than Lightroom.