I'm pretty confused about folders/collections.. I have asked Arty about how to organize and I think the bottom line is that I do not not have the ability to list (when uploading) in both the general (master) collection as well as subfolders without making copies of the images. I hope I'm making sense here. If this is correct it would be great to have the option of placing images in both the main gallery as well as a collection (folder).
I ran into the same thing when I first organized my landscape work here. Took me a couple tries to figure out the folder logic. If I'm reading you right, you want the same image visible in your main gallery and also nested in a specific collection without duplicating the file itself, yeah? I ended up just keeping my main gallery as the full archive and using collections for curated subsets, like best-of or client favorites. Not perfect, but it keeps things cleaner than having duplicates everywhere. Would love if the platform let us tag images into multiple places without the copy step, though.
I ran into the same thing when I was organizing all my lamp photos. The way I ended up thinking about it: the main gallery is the storefront, collections are the drawers. So I put my strongest pieces in the main space where people land first, then use collections to let someone who's interested dig deeper into a specific series. It's not perfect, but once I stopped trying to have everything everywhere, it got easier to decide what goes where.