question about importing

[bjc]

figured i would start off with a question and see if anyone out there can help.... i am a bit confused about what happens when you import..... are you importing to lightroom and also to your hard drive??? if the files are in both places does that fill up your computer more? and if i import from the flash card reader can you change the naming??/ now it seems that you only have choice of names that are by the date.....and i correct??? or how can you make a name that is a date and a subject...that is how i call my files so i can quickly find something...the old brain doesnt always remember the dates only...lol....

and my other question is can you go from lightroom to burn a dvd???

[jtaubman]

i am a bit confused about what happens when you import..... are you importing to lightroom and also to your hard drive???

There are two import options if you look. When you have a removable card plugged in you get a choice as to if you want to simply add existing files to the lightroom catalog, or copy photos from the removable card, to your selected location on your hard disk.


if the files are in both places does that fill up your computer more? and if i import from the flash card reader can you change the naming??

You can configure the rename on the dropdown and customise, personally I don't as I prefer to use keywords to catalog rather than changing the photo names, my camera sequentially numbers all my photos so I know each name is unique.

I keep all my photos by folders of year/month/ddmmyy and then keyword for location and people in them plus type of photo.

It's then easy to find the ones I am looking for. I imported to lightroom all my existing photos on my harddisk (about 15,000). It does build a cache of photos, but you can configure how long to keep the cache and it does not need backing up as Lightroom can rebuild it.

You can export to a CD, just look in the export options drop down.

[bjc]

hi jane,

not sure my non computer brain can follow all that you wrote here but will try to decifer....thanks so much...also what i am confused by is if i have my cf card in and go to import it seems all the photos on the cf card come up and i have to manually, one at a time check ( to uncheck) those that i dont want to import ( lets say i have already imported them into another folder but havent taken them off the card...which is often the case for me) it seems very time consuming to be individually unchecking those you dont want...i tried unchecking all andd then seeing if i could check the one i want to start from and then go to the end and check and nothing happened to the ones in between...is this right??? cause then this can be a pain.... hope you understand my question...thanks again

[jtaubman]

If they are already in Lightroom you don't need to de-select them as LR will spot it already has them and not bother bringing them in.

Simply my workflow for import is as follows.
Insert Card
Start Lightroom
Import all photos on card
Delete the junk photos and check all the keywords and location fields are set.
Sync My Pictures to my Backup Drive
Format/Clear Card
Finally do all the corrections, cropping etc.