Lightroom import help

dannyjo22 · 22 Jan 2014 at 10:24

One area of LR I always struggle with is import. I'm a tidy freak and like my folders set out with the minimum of sub folders.

The way I have been importing is all my LR photos are on my H drive in one file named Lightroom. That's then divided down in year so this year 2014 photo's. When I take some pictures of my son for instance, I create one folder called Joseph 2014 and dump all my pics in there straight off the card. I then Import from the hard drive into LR.

I thought I'd try and give it a go importing straight from a plugged in card. Create a 2014 folder, add a file called Joseph 2014 and import. Yet out it comes out looking like this....

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Does it have to create those two sub folders within the Joseph 2014 folder? I wouldn't mind too but it does it on the HDD too and will then seperate them every time I add to the folder. If I do it the way I was, importing from the HDD my file structure looks like this....

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No folders within the Joseph 2013 one and will be like that on my HDD.

I hope this makes sence? Am I doing something wrong or is this just the way it has to be?

dannyjo22 · 22 Jan 2014 at 10:52

So like me you are putting your files from the camera onto HDD first and then importing those to LR?

dannyjo22 · 22 Jan 2014 at 11:08

Yeah that seems to be my only way as I don't want all those sub folders within folders on lightroom or on my HDD where the photos are stored. I thought I could make the process faster by importing directly from the Flash card but it seems not?

dannyjo22 · 22 Jan 2014 at 16:08

Ah ok seem's to be the best way then to stop having those sub folders within folders. As every single LR import guide I can find seems to do it that way I assumed I was doing it differently

I don't know why they do that on import, it's untidy as hell then where you store your photo's.

dannyjo22 · 23 Jan 2014 at 08:33

Genoma said:
I'm pretty sure you can avoid the date folders by editing the destination option, and changing 'organise' to 'into one folder' ?

I will try that later when I'm home. I did notice that there seemed to be more import options applying presets etc straight from the card than from my HDD although I probably had something not ticked correctly

dannyjo22 · 24 Jan 2014 at 07:18

Genoma said:
done

Thanks for that, I'm sure it's not as long winded as it looks

I have started reading lightroom magazine on the ipad and the guy the writes it suggests never bothering importing and labelling by date because you will never remember the date anyway and if you could you can search by date anyway.

Energize said:
It's not worth the time sorting into folders when you can just tag the photos.

Leaving an awful mess on your hdd if you wanted to start using another program or just want to find pictures without using lightroom?