Mastering Lightroom Classic CC - 2: Importing

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T from online photography training.com welcome to my video series and mastering Lightroom classic CC in this video we're gonna delve a little bit deeper into the import process in Lightroom now as you can see I have my desktop here and on my desktop you can see that I have a memory card plugged into my computer also I have Lightroom open and I did mention in the last video that if you want to import images and you're in the library module it's very easy to summon the import dialog box because there's a button over here at the bottom of the left-hand panel if you're in any of the other modules that button will not be there and then you'll have to go up to the file menu then down to import photos and video and you can see to the right of that in to the right of many of the other menu items there is a keyboard shortcut shift command I that's because I have a Mac if you have a PC it's shift control I and keyboard shortcuts do make life considerably easier in Lightroom so I encourage you to go over to my website and download my Lightroom keyboard shortcut cheat sheet there's hundreds of keyboard shortcuts in Lightroom and I think you'll find that cheat sheet invaluable so I want to summon the import dialog box so I'm just going to click on that and you could see it will immediately opens up now there is a chance that your import dialog box will not look like mine if that's the case look over here in the lower left-hand corner you can see there's a little square with an upward facing triangle if I click on that it minimizes the box and the import box now just has the essential information that Lightroom will need to import your images typically most of us don't use this smaller import dialog we use the larger ones so if you're seeing this go over to the left hand corner and you can see that boxes there with the downward facing triangle this time click on that box and it will open up into the larger import dialog now if you have your camera plugged into your computer or a memory card Lightroom should have found the images automatically in Lightroom would be displaying them as it is on my computer here if you do not have a memory card or your camera plugged in Lightroom may not be able to find the images especially if they're on the internal hard drive or an external hard drive or something like that if that's the case you're gonna have to navigate to where those images are now for the sake of this demonstration if we look over at the left-hand panel you can see that it found my memory card it's a Nikon d80 XQD card so it's showing it right away but let's just say that plug that card wasn't plugged in well you could look down here and it shows the various hard drives associated with the computer I have the internal Macintosh drive and then I have four external hard drives plugged in then it has that memory card if that memory card isn't plugged in that wouldn't be there but let's just say I have some images on this hard drive called Morgan T Drive I would hit this little triangle that is called an expose triangle and once my drive wakes up because it went to sleep you'll see all the folders that are on that drive and then from this point I could drill down to where the images are and I have a folder called Instagram pictures and I could either double click on it to open the folder or hit the expose triangle again to show more folders that are under that folder but I could just click on it once really I don't have to double click on it and it will display all the images that are in that folder now in this case these are images that are on that external hard drive this may happen sometimes you may have images on a hard drive and you want to load them into Lightroom well once you do that you found them you could look at them and you can see they all have Chuck marks on them so they're ready to import into Lightroom we're looking at what is called the grid view if you want to look at an individual image you could go down here in the lower left-hand corner you can see there's two boxes this box right here is for looking at a single image we'll click on that and we're on a single image now you could view them in this larger format and you may call them from here like if you want to import this one just use your arrow keys to go through all the images I'll use my right arrow key to go to the next image the right arrow key the next image right arrow key the next image and let's say I do not want to import this one I could just click this little checkbox off and then I won't be importing that if I want to go back to the grid view I can go back over here and click this little box again and I'm back into the grid view now the keyboard shortcut for these two different views is G for grid view and E for that single image view so if I hit the e key on my keyboard I have the single image if I hit G I'm back to grid view and then you can see this one image right here I turned it off I unchecked it so that image would not be imported into the Lightroom library now when you import there's several different ways you could import the image technically there's four different ways if we go up here and look at the top we see we have copy as D and G copy move and ad copy as D and G we'll take your original file wherever it is if it's on a memory card or if it's on an external hard drive or if even if it's on your local drive and it will convert it to a dmg file D and G stands for digital negative and it is Adobe's version of a raw file yeah it's open source and I think Adobe when they created it they were hoping that all camera manufacturers would use this single open source format for RAW files and we'd have some continuity from between all the brands as far as their RAW files were concerned well unfortunately all the manufacturers decided to make their own proprietary RAW files so you would have to if you want to use a dmg file you you could convert it when you import it now the advantage of using a DNG file is it tends to be smaller than the manufacturers raw file and it tends to render a little quicker in the computer the disadvantages of it are that if you have your computer set up to write the edits typically I should back up a little bit when you edit an image in Lightroom the because Lightroom is non-destructive the edits get written to the Lightroom catalog they're stored there there is an option in Lightroom and we'll talk about it in a future episode where you could also have Lightroom write those edits to an external sidecar file they call it so if your raw file is in a specific folder the edits will be written to the Lightroom catalog and to an external file that will be in the same folder as the original image they call that a sidecar file if you're using DNG RAW files that sidecar file is not created instead the edits are written directly to the dmg file and a lot of people do not like that even though it's still non-destructive you could still go back through all your steps and undo what you did because you're writing to the original raw file there is a chance that that file could be corrupted usually files are corrupted during write operations so if you have the most valuable picture in the world you took a picture of Bigfoot and you're editing it and you have it set up so the edits are written as a sidecar file but you're using a D and G raw file those edits will be written directly to that dmg file and if for some reason you have a glitch in your computer or your computer shuts off and mid right you could corrupt that file and lose that Bigfoot picture forever so a lot of people don't like DNG files just for that reason nowadays everything is very reliable and you tend not to have computers crashing during mid rites or even if they do they tend not to damage the files it's up to you whether you want to use DNG as they did say it does seem to render a little quicker and it does take up less disk space the other option you have is just to copy them as is so you're gonna copy the files exactly as they are they're gonna keep the same name and everything usually unless you rename them but they're the same file that are the same raw file the other two options are move and add if I have these as I have these on this morgen T hard drive they're in the folder Instagram pictures if I move them then that will take them out of that folder and put them in whatever folder I tell it to go into over here on the right-hand panel and we'll get to that in a minute so you're actually moving them the other option is add if you choose this add option the pictures will stay exactly where they are you're just going to add them to the Lightroom library so when you open Lightroom and go to edit one of those images Lightroom is going to look to this more ganti drive to this folder to find the image so there's these four different choices but sometimes you'll only be able to do two of the four choices and that is when you're using a memory card or you have your computer plugged into your computer or your heavier you have your camera plugged into your computer if that is the case and that is the case here I have a memory card plugged into my computer the move and add functions are not applicable so I either could copy them as they are and these happen to be Nikon RAW files or I could copy them as a dmg file I don't use dmg files I use my original RAW files so I would choose copy so that is that hopefully that made sense so after we choose how we're going to get them into Lightroom either isn't it dmg file a straight copy or in some cases we're moving them from one folder to another or we're just adding them into Lightroom once we decide that as we look at them there's different ways we could view them in this middle part all photos meaning we're gonna look at everything photo that is in that location in this case it's this memory card new photos if I imported images into Lightroom and I left them on the memory card then took new images if I click this little box here then only the new images would be displayed the last choice is destination folders if I took pictures over a number of days and head them all on the memory card and then put that memory card and opened up this import dialog and click this destination folders then each day basically would be shown here as you can see now it's showing May 10 2008 een I took these pictures this morning if I took pictures yesterday we'd have another group of pictures saying may 9 2008 een if I took pictures two days ago we'd have a third group saying May 8th 2018 so that's just how they're displayed in this middle part typically you just leave them on all photos you could call them here as I mentioned so you could either double click on one to bring it into this view and then include or exclude it in import by going there you could of course use the keyboard shortcut as e is an Edward to go into this view it G to go to the grid view you could change the size of these images with this slider over here so you're making thumbnails bigger or smaller to help you see them a little better and get an idea whether or not you want to import all of them and the sort I have it by default sorted to capture time so I took this image first in this image last you also could do it by the this the checks say state so if I have one unchecked it'll go toward the end or the unchecked ones will be at the end and the other is the file name so in alphabetical order if you want to flip it you click right here and you'd go from A to Z to Z to a the file type in this case they're all Nikon RAW files so they're going to be the same but if you had various raw different types of files here they'd be sorted by I'll type media-type they're all Nikon RAW files if you had some video files in here they'd be in their own group so like I said I usually keep that on capture time so that's really how you kind of find your images then organize your images to view them in the middle part now the real meat and potatoes of the import dialog box is over here on the right-hand panel it's a very very top you could see there's this thing here it says two photos from this drive or song it's like confusing but if you click on it what that is it's kind of like shortcuts to popular places on your computer I could import these photos to my desktop pictures or movies folders very easily by clicking here or we could go to an other destination and actually if I do that and because I have a Mac Mac finder opens up and I could drill down to where I want them to go if you have a PC of course Windows File Explorer will open up and you could go and pick the folder you want to send these images to usually we don't use this top part unless you're really in a hurry and you want to just like send them to your desktop or to your pictures or movies folders usually what we'll do is we'll do that down here where it says destination so we'll get to that in a minute the real thing though is all the different things you could do to the image as you're importing it starting at the top when you're importing it it's going to ask you at the top here what kind of preview do you want to build and I did touch on this in the last video there's four different previews minimal embedded in sidecar standard in one to one the minimal previews take up the least amount of space on your computer the one on one previews take up the most so they get from very little space on your computer a little more space a little more space to the most space but the minimal previews will take longer to render as you go from image to image as you have the images in imported and you have the film strip along the bottom of your computer and you use the arrow keys or you click on an image to view it it takes a second or two to render and if you have minimal previews it takes a little longer for them to render because the minimal preview isn't of high enough resolution for you to view it in the middle part here so it takes a little longer for for Lightroom to build a acceptable preview so you could view it embedded in sidecar is a little bit bigger and the it actually has two previous one is embedded in the raw file and another one is a sidecar file I don't know anyone that uses that that option that will render a little faster standard is usually what I use the previews are a little larger they take up a little more disk space but they render a little bit quicker and when I say render slow or renders fast we're not talking about minutes here we're talking about less than 5 seconds so it's a minor inconvenience if you're using minimal previews for them to render on most computers the render very quickly where you may run into an issue is if your computer has less than 12 gigabytes of RAM Adobe recommends that any computer running Lightroom have at least 12 gigabytes of RAM and where you're well where you will see that issue is with your previews when they render if you don't have a large enough Ram install that enough RAM installed on your computer it will render slower this iMac I work on has 32 gigabytes of RAM my MacBook has 16 gigabytes of RAM and they both render fine the last one is one-to-one previews these are the most resolute of the previews they render the quickest but they take up the most disk space so use whichever preview works for you below that we have a checkbox build smart previews if you have it your images stored on an external hard drive like I do I have all my Lightroom images on an external hard drive if you unplug that hard drive and open up Lightroom you will not be able to work on the images the hard drive has to be turned on plugged in loaded ready to go otherwise you won't be able to work on an image unless you build a smart preview smart previews allow you to process an image without the image being present so you could do that if you often use this come more in common if you have a laptop or a MacBook or something and you have all your images on an external hard drive but you often just grab the computer you're at a coffee shop or something you don't feel like plugging in the external hard drive you could just then process images the problem is or the thing is that smart previews do take up the most disk disk space because they're really an image they're pretty big so keep that in mind you may not want to have all your images be smart previews only those you know you're going to be processing in the future without the hard drive being plugged in below that we have don't import suspected duplicates if this is checked if an image if lightroom thinks an image was already imported it would be grayed out and the check box would be turned off just like that and then if you go to new photos up here that will not show but because it's showing now because this image isn't is a new photo even though I'm not checking it so that is what don't import suspected duplicates do you could backup your images as you import them you could make a second copy to somewhere else on your system so you would check this box click this little expose triangle over here and then you could choose a folder and again Mac finder or Windows File Explorer will pop up you could pick a folder on your computer and then Lightroom will import the image to where you want it to go and make a copy of that import and put it where you want it to go below that is add to collection we're gonna have a video in the future where we talk about collections in Lightroom collections are a great feature of Lightroom typically all your images are on folders and the folders are discrete meaning they're actually on your hard drive you could go outside a Lightroom use file explorer or something and find that folder and that whole hierarchy will be present on your hard drive a collection is virtual let's say that you went to 20 different zoos last year and you have thousands of images but you have like hundreds of images of polar bears and they're all across all these different zoo folders who have well you could make a collection that just contains the polar bears and then you could easily go to that collection view all your polar bear images in one place doesn't take any up any more disk space it's a virtual place where images reside and you could do that right when you're importing so I could import these to a specific collection if I wanted to when I click the box I could send it to what is inherent in Lightroom is ah is a quick collection I could do that that's in all everyone's Lightroom or I could click this little plus sign and create a new collection and we're gonna get into collections into some detail in a future video below that is file renaming you may want to rename the files you may not want to use the original file name if that's the case you could click there and there's a couple different templates or several different templates you could use click on the drop-down and you can see there's a custom name X of Y so if I call these um like Museum one of to one of or two of two something like that that's how they would get named original file number custom name with the original file number custom named sequence all these so you could come in here and pick one of these and then it gives you an example of what it will look like here so you could do any of these if you prefer then it might some of them might ask you to give it a word like a name like that's you were using short name original file number so you would add it there you could edit these if you want to go to this drop-down go to edit and you can see we have shoot name not short name shoot name file number suffix if I want to get rid of these let's say I want to get rid of file number suffix I would click on that and I could just hit the Delete key so I got that out of there and then I could add some to it maybe I want to add the date so I could just go to this drop-down what format a date - I want to use year month and day and it gets added to that so I could put short name then the shoot name this is you know the Buffalo History Museum shoot and the date of it then once I'm done I could click done and it's going to be an edited version of that template or I could click here and go down to save current settings as a new preset click on that give it a name I'll give it a name demo and click create and then click done now when I go to the drop down you can see demo is there so I could click on any of these and include a demo and demo is the way we had it if you want to get rid of this go down to edit we're on demo go to the drop down delete preset demo click on that it's gonna ask you you sure you want to do that click delete and then click done now that drop down demo is gone you may have screwed these up maybe you edited them and change them around and you wouldn't want to get back to their original versions click to edit again go to this drop-down again and then go down to restore default presets click on that and then click done and you'll have your default presets the way they were set up when you originally used Lightroom just like that so there's a lot of different ways you could rename the files renaming files is could help you find them later a lot of times it's hard to find a file when it's underscore DSC 1 4 7 7 1 or something whatever dot NEF it's hard to find that because you're not really sure what it is so you could rename these to something that you'd remember and easily find there's a lot of good search functionality in Lightroom and we're going to be covering that in a future video how you could search for images and renaming could help now I mentioned in the previous video that there's two different types of presets you could apply to your image as you're importing it one of those is a develop preset those are just the presets that come with Lightroom or those you might buy from a third-party that when you as you're importing the image into Lightroom it'll apply that processing preset to your image the other type of preset is a metadata preset in my case I've I have a import preset that I created and I will show how to do this in a future video that import preset puts my name my address my contact info my copyright info and my rights info or what I own the image basically so that all gets added to the mat it added to the metadata as my images being imported and I strongly suggest you create an import preset of your own and again I will be showing that in a future video it's not done creating the import preset isn't done in this screen it's done somewhere else now keywords I strongly suggest this is where I screwed up when I first started using Lightroom I strongly suggest that you add keywords to your image it makes it so much easier to search for images when you have pertinent keywords for your image if you don't have a collection of polar bears and you have them all in those twenty different zoo locations and maybe you went to more the zoo more than once and you have all these subfolders of dates and all this other stuff but if you had put in the keyword polar bear you be evil easy to find all your polar bear images so in this case here this is Buffalo then put a comma so separate your keywords by comma then I go this is a history museum [Music] I could put in this is um cherry blossoms then I like putting my copyright in my name in there also even though that is being added to the metadata already what my import preset I like to put it as a keyword as well so with a Mac it's easy to get the copyright symbol you just hold in the option key and hit the G key and you'll get the copyright symbol and you can see it's defaulting to my name because I've done this before so then you could just you know hit tab and it's in there with a PC I'm not sure how you get that copyright symbol but if somebody could write in the comments below this video how you do it I'm sure everyone would appreciate that so just click enter like that and then you have the key words now and all those will get added to every image as they're being imported now the big part is destination where are we going to put these things well this is where I screwed up too I have them going into the location folder and inside of that location folder I have a subfolder of date I found it very difficult now that I have like 6070 thousand images in my Lightroom to find us very specific image often I get somebody calling me and they want to purchase this very specific image and I don't remember where I put it and I didn't really put good keywords in when I imported it so I takes me long time to find the image so what I would suggest you do is sit down get a piece of paper figure out how you would need to find images in the future and then try to set up a file system that will allow you to do that I would encourage to anyone watching this video if you have a great way to import and sort images in the comments below tell us how you do it like I mentioned I do it by location in this case the location was the Buffalo History Museum it would be Buffalo History Museum and then today's date well that kind of stinks like I said there might be a better way if you're a wedding photographer I think the best way is you put the couple's name the wedding name so you just photograph the Wilson family so you have Wilson you might want to have the date or you might want to rename the images with the date included in the name so you know what date they were taken so that maybe is a way you'd want to do it a portrait photographer may do it that way also they're doing the Smith family something like that but there's all different wildlife photographer if you're out you know shooting lions you may prefer that you know all your lions to be in one category something like that so I encourage anyone that has a great way to do it post it below because I really need to get better at the way I'm sorting and filing my images so for the sake of this discussion I'm going to keep doing it this way so I'm going to put them into the subfolder Buffalo history and I should probably call it Museum oh I have Museum there okay so Buffalo History Museum and then I'm going to organize them by date after that so you can see down here it's going into the photos hard drive that's where I'm storing these images if I wanted to put them on let's say the media note let's say that morgue auntie drive again if I wanted to put him there and I wanted to put it in books then they would go there you could see it has Buffalo History Museum and then a subfolder with the date so right here you find where you want to put them I have on my photos external hard drive I have one folder that says RAW files I wanted to go into that raw files folder and it's going to go there in a subfolder called buffalo history museum see it's written there and then a subfolder of that with the date 2018 May 10th that's the way I always do it and I found that it doesn't work that great but for the sake of this demonstration you get an idea how this little part of the import process works a lot of people like to not use this meaning they'll won't have Lightroom open they use Windows File Explorer or Mac finder to create folders then they just drag their images off their memory card or off their computer or off their on camera I'm sorry into that folder then they use the add function up here to add them into Lightroom that's the way I actually I used to do it a lot do it a long time ago do whichever way works best for you but once you have this now really we're done so we have them going into the raw files folder and they're gonna go into the buffalo you history museum subfolder and into the May 10 2008 een subfolder of that so that's the file hierarchy so we're satisfied just click now once you click import by default Lightroom is going to go up here on the left when you're in the library module if you look at the catalog section over here in the left-hand panel you're gonna go to the current import folder it's not really a folder it's like a location so you're gonna go there and it's going to then add the full the images it's gonna copy them from the memory card add the metadata I want to add and add the keywords I want to add I'm not renaming them or anything like that and it's putting them in that folder on the hard drive so if I go over to this photos external drive and I open up this buffalo history museum subfolder and then I now these are temp as it's importing those will go away Lightroom is just using those to hold the images but you could see here the images are going in there getting added as we go into this folder just like that so they're getting put into this folder and we're in grid view we're in the library module if you want to go and look at a single image you could just like double click on the image and you'll view the image or again you could use those keyboard shortcuts G to go to the grid view or E to go to that single image view so you could easily pop out also those two icons are still here in the lower left-hand corner of your screen so you could go to the single view their grid view there so that's them importing once the import process is totally done your computer will sound then it will create the previews while it's creating the previews even while it was importing I could start processing an image I don't have to wait so you know I could go in into the develop module and start processing an image and then it creates previews and some computers will be slower creating the previews the smaller previews of course go really fast the one-to-one previews will take a little more time the smart previews will take a lot more time so you can come in and you could you know pick an image you want to process and then you could go over to the develop module and start processing now that's the import process once you get them in here you should call them you should get rid of the crappy ones the ones that you know you messed up exposure or they're crooked or whatever you know someone photobombed them and you want to get rid of it or and you should prioritize the better ones the ones you want to process right away the ones you think you're going to be able to sell or or share or whatever you want to do with them and that's going to be our next video I'm going to give you a lot of tips and techniques on how to cull your images and compare images to see which one is the best out of 2 3 4 images so look for that in our next video thank you everyone that watches my videos I truly do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 147,338

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop

Id: M938-YxiDoM

Length: 35min 28sec (2128 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2018