Moving files means loosing edits

[HansKG]

Dear all.

I post this topic again, because my first post is not visible for me. Sorry for any inconvenience that may occure.

To become familiar with Nitro, I first worked with it on some kind of test basis. This means that I am archiving my photos in Lightroom, and the editing process and post processing has been done with Nitro.

It also means I don’t use Apple Photos when I use Nitro. It’s not practical for me to keep all 110,000 photos on iCloud.

So far, so good.

During the testing, I kept “dragging” a folder containing photos into Nitro and editing the pictures to see how it went.

My folder hierarchy for all my photos is as follows (which is also mapped in Lightroom). Example:

Family pictures
—2025
— —2025-04-15- Test folder 1
— — — Part-A-01
— —2025-05-01- Test Folder 2
— — — Part-B-01
— —2025-05-11- Test Folder 3
— — — Part-K-01
— — — Part-L-02
— — — Part-M-03

The situation is as follows: I currently have many “independent” subfolders in Nitro. E.g.:

2025-04-15- Test Folder 1
Part-B-01
Part-L-02

But now I want to get rid of these single folders and link to the root folder of all my photos within Nitro, just like in Lightroom. Stated differently, my goal is to incorporate the root structure into Nitro such that every one of the 110,000 photos is visible there.

If I now import the folder structure and the images, I can no longer see the edits (LUT/exposure …) of the photos edited in past weeks or months.

The second case is when I move files in the Finder from one folder to another, but within the folder structure, the edits are also no longer visible.

My Questions:

Is there a way to solve these two problems? Am I doing something incorrectly?

For instance, in Nitro, I have not encountered any method of moving images between subfolders.

I sincerely appreciate your help in advance.

BR Hans

[Nik Bhatt]

Since you are not using Apple Photos, then all ratings and edits are stored in XMP files. That XMP files have the same name as the original image with a suffix and file extension.
If you move or reorganize the files, you need to also move the XMP files. If you rename the files, you have to rename the XMP file as well.

Again, since you are using the file system, it’s important to use folders to organize the photos. If you combine all of the folders into a single giant folder with 110,000 files + XMP files, performance will suffer (in general – file systems are much more efficient when the files are organized into folders).

The app does not yet have the ability to move images between folders. It’s on the list, but I just have not gotten to it yet. Simple moving is easy, but people usually want renaming features and stuff like that.

One other note. You do not need to use iCloud to use Apple Photos. You can just have a Photos library that is not connected to the cloud.

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