Top 4 Importing Tips for Adobe Lightroom Classic

on today's episode we're talking about the top four tips that you need to know when importing images into adobe lightroom classic [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello and welcome to episode 56 of photo kitchen i am your humble host md welch and today we're talking importing images inside of adobe lightroom classic now importing images into the lightroom classic can be a little intimidating for the first time user or even someone who's been using lightroom classic for a while and still isn't completely comfortable with all of these options so i'm going to give you the top four things that you need to know to make the import process easier so the first thing i want to point out is that you can import images into lightroom classic a few different ways and this isn't even one of the tips this is just a little bit of bonus information if you're in the library module which is up here in the upper right hand corner you will have access to the import button in the bottom left-hand corner but you can always get to import photos and video by going up to the menu bar file and then import photos and video so if you're in a different module and you didn't want to go back to the library module you could do that and there's even a keyboard shortcut for that also i already have my camera connected to the computer but in many cases when you connect your camera or card reader the import window will automatically open for you so i'm going to go ahead and click import photos and video and this will open up the import window now i will automatically start building some thumbnails here and that's not nearly that big of a deal because the first thing i'm going to talk about or the first tip is this little option bar in the upper middle part of the screen where it starts with copies dng copy then move and then add the good news is is that when you're importing from a camera or card reader two of these options both add and move are not available to you because adobe wants you to copy the images from the camera card or the camera onto your computer so you only have copy or copy as dng available so my first tip here is what to choose copy or copy as dng and i'm going to tell you from years of experience that you want to use copy adobe's been talking about dng files for a very very long time this is a generic camera raw file that adobe will convert your sp camera specific raw file in my case i'm shooting sony here dot arw files but if you were shooting nikon it'd be neff if you were shooting canon it would be cr2 uh i'm forget some of the other camera companies out there but they all have their specific file suffix and their specific raw file format for you when you convert to dng the theory is at least that you create a generic file that will be able to be opened and used by any application out there and i'm here to tell you and this is the very important thing about this first tip is that's not necessarily true i use a lot of different raw converters out there one of the other ones that i use is capture one and capture one doesn't like dng files that generic thing that adobe's been telling a lot of us for years doesn't seem to apply to other non-adobe camera raw readers out there now there's some pros to still using dng you get a smaller file size it incorporates xmp sidecar files and a lot of that kind of stuff into the file but honestly all of those pluses really get outweighed the minute that you might leave adobe now you might not be leaving adobe anytime soon or ever but if you ever do all of your dng files will be very hard to use later on in other programs at least that's my experience so i choose to use copy over copy as dng also another thing about this first top tip is that copy as dng will take almost twice as long to import so if you're in a rush or you're in a hurry to get images out you are better off to do copy it will import faster and you can start to access your files much quicker you can always convert to dng later on so that's another good plus if you want to do that in fact most of the options i'm about to show you in the import window can be done well after you import them inside of lightroom so you don't have to really worry about these too much but it's really nice to get it correct from the start my second top tip is the file handling window and this is another speed versus import kind of issue the big thing here is build previews so the menu breaks down like this going from top to bottom it's basically this ratio of size of preview files versus import speed at the top starting with minimal you will get the smallest preview file but you will get the images imported the fastest down at the bottom at one to one you will get the largest in fact you will get a one to one ratio or a hundred percent build jpeg preview of your raw file but it will take much longer to build so my recommendation is is if you're in a hurry go with minimal if you're not in a hurry if you're somebody who plugs in your cards and you walk away from lightroom classic for a very long period of time and you're not in a rush to get anything imported go with one to one again you can always build these preview files later if you want to i have embedded inside card shows in here because this is an interesting option because it will take the jpeg previews built from your camera because when you're reviewing your images on your lcd screen you are actually seeing jpeg previews it will take those jpegs and use those as preview files and sometimes this will give you this happy medium between small files quick import or large files slow import this is a nice thing to experiment with and see if it actually impacts your workflow but again if you're not in a hurry build them at one to one take that extra time so my third top tip applies to two other panels here and that's both file renaming and apply during import both of these panels again can have their options applied well after you've imported your images into adobe lightroom classic so they're not that big of a deal i strongly recommend to my students and other photographers i consult with not to rename images on import mostly because a lot of images that you are going to import are probably going to end up in the trash bin and why have huge gaps in the number sequence when you're looking at these images especially if you're providing these images to clients they might ask even if you give them 500 great images why there's gaps in the number sequences did you give them everything this is an easy way to not only speed up the import process a little bit but maybe save you a headache when you're dealing with clients apply during import is very much in that same idea of saving yourself time in fact this could save you even more time because applying development presets and metadata presets on import if you're in a hurry could slow down the process even more now if you're again if you're not in a hurry go ahead and apply your import presets especially metadata because that's not really that big of an impact on to your file import speed development will but again if you're not in a hurry go ahead and apply your presets but if you are set them to none do your work and then apply the presets only to those images that maybe you need to turn around really quick my fourth top tip deals with the destination panel and i'm going to collapse these other panels down to make this easier to see destination is probably the one option even though that if you do get this wrong you can move the images around but this is the probably the one option in the import process that you want to get right from the start where are the files going to be stored so i have a folder already selected here and i'm actually going to come up i'm going to collapse down i'm importing this to a raid that i have here and i'm just going to import this these images into a folder called photography now when i select this folder up top in the destination panel there is an option on how this is going to be stored now if i check into subfolder i will get a subfolder option here that i can name this and in this case this lovely model is named jessica right so i could create a folder automatically called jessica and all of the images are going to drop in here the next option down below is organized how are these going to be organized and this is maybe one of my favorite features of lightroom classic because not a lot of other raw converting software programs do this but what you could do is instead of doing by original folders or into one folder you could select by date what that will do is then give you a date sequence here that you could choose from and so it just gives you a little preview of what it's going to look like when you import them essentially every little backslash here will be a new subfolder if you're photographing the same location the same objects the same model the same client this can be great because it could break up all of your content automatically into subfolders by year month and even day if you take a look at an example of this that i've done in the past you can see i have a model's name here and then i have the years that i photograph the model and in some cases i photograph them on multiple days now this is great because it makes it easier to find these files inside of lightroom without having to do a metadata search like if i'm looking for something that i shot in 2015 i don't have to say go find 2015 or i could start there and call my images down quicker but also if i'm not in lightroom classic i could save a lot of time by being able to access these files easily on my hard drive this is a huge time saver and it's something i highly recommend especially to those of you again travel photographers landscape photographers those of you who are going maybe to the same place multiple times a year or multiple times over your career this will save you time in the long run when you're trying to find your files inside your catalog of adobe lightroom classic so my fourth and last tip for importing images into adobe lightroom classic is import all of them even though that i have quite a few images here at the beginning of my sequence that i'm playing around with light i'm testing things just shooting some blank frames maybe some flashes didn't fire i'm getting silhouettes of the model the fact of the matter is is you are not looking at very high quality previews inside of this window adobe's just basically generating a quick thing for you to look at this in fact this is as large as i can make the thumbnails inside of this particular program so unless you had two radically different subjects that needed to be imported to different destination fields it's always a good idea just to have check all selected so all of the images are selected and import everything inside of adobe lightroom classic and then ascertain whether or not you want to hold on to those files whether you want to edit them export them out you're not going to see whether or not something's in or out of focus inside this window so why waste your time the only exception to this is and it's a bad idea to shoot multiple subjects on a card or multiple days is if you did in fact do that and you had multiple people here so in fact i did do that i was photographing the studio all day long so ironically this could be an exception to the rule where i would uncheck and check images because i have different people inside of here but if it's all the same subject import everything at once save yourself the time and once adobe lightroom classic is finished with the import process you could really then see what images you want to keep and edit and what images need to be thrown away i hope you enjoyed these top tips if so give this video a like if you haven't subscribed to my channel please do so also feel free to leave a comment down below if you have any little import secrets for adobe lightroom classic as always i'm your humble host md welch wishing you all the best from photo kitchen take care [Applause] you

Channel: Photo Kitchen

Views: 8,777

Keywords: lightroom, lightroom classic, digital photography, import secrets, digital imaging

Id: 1gRGIgW2nG4

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022