2 Lightroom questions about file organization

The top of the FIlmstrip in Library should include sorting options. If these are not showing, press T to activate the Toolbar. If these are still not showing, a downward-pointing triangle arrow at the right hand side of the Toobar lets you set which options show there.

The Sort options include the date "added" - which would put fresh imports at the end of the run - and date "captured" - which would put different versions of the same original exposure, side-by-side since the relevant EXIF information would be naturally identical between these.

Alternatively, if detemined to substitute your Raw+JPG with edited JPG, you might consider doing your Export into "same folder as original" (to keep the folder classification) but selecting a standard subfolder within that, at least for the interim. This would allow you to easily discriminate the camera JPGs from the new JPGs, also would prevent the new JPGs from getting mixed-up in the whole "sidecar" thing - which always relies on files being physically in the same folder.

You have control over the way the images are presented - there is no "beginning" or "end" of the Catalog. Everything you see is a "view" that has been generated from a database according to current rules, and you decide what those are to be.

This is fundamental, and worth reinforcing IMO to explain the different attitude needed to get the most out of a program like LR. When browsing a disk's folders and files conventionally, what you see depends only on what is there physically, and to see something different you would have to move things around physically, which would mean you could then no longer see them as they were before.

In LR if you want to see the images presented differently, you merely change the way that LR is currently showing them to you. But this does not prevent you from seeing them the way you saw them before, or any other way, as well. The Filmstrip (like Grid view) is NOT "a place where things are"; it is the dynamic outcome of a database search that you are in constant control of. Even when you click on a Folder, you are not literally seeing the files that are in that folder. You are seeing whichever images in your Catalog (whether master or virtual), are known (or thought) by the Catalog to relate to an image filed stored there, and this is no different than filtering the ones with 3 stars, or taken with a certain lens, etc. The file location is an attribute stored about an image - which is how this "folder information" can still be shown even when the drive involved is not physically available; or, when it has become invalidated through moving things outside of LR.