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Importing into Lightroom

So we've put our photos in the right place. We've put him on a raid, one system so that it's backed up. We have. Our image is secure. And now it's time to start doing the fun part, which is looking at the photos themselves. Now. I talked to you about the idea that light room is kind of a library system. It's really the photos exist in the hard drive, but light room itself is never actually going to touch the photographs. They're always secure. They're always safe. It's a non destructive system. And so those images. We're just going to sit there in that hard drive, but we need to import them into light room. And when I say import in tow, light room, especially light room classic. The import process is not moving the files. It's not doing anything with the files. All it's doing is looking at the files, seeing what they look like and bringing them into light room as previews of the images. So you never actually adjusting the actual riel raw file. You never actually looking at the real raw...

file. You're looking at a preview of the file and then every time you adjust it. It's looking at the raw file, and it's making a new preview as to what it would look like if it were to export that file from the raw file. As with those changes, so you're really never doing anything to the raw file? And the only time that all those changes that you're gonna make inside a light room actually happen is when you export them when you send them out and share them somewhere, so we have to import them. But I need you to understand that you're not importing. You're not bringing him into light room. You're actually just making a reference. So let's go into the process of importing. So I'm going to the import button down here on the left hand side off the library module. I'm gonna open up. By the way, everywhere in light room, there are these little, um, these little triangles up at the top. They're over at the right hand side, the left hand side and the bottom side, and if you click on him, it shuts or opens that panel. So if you want to get rid of something and make more real estate, you can do that. You can also hit the shift tab key, and it will get rid of all of them at once. Shift tab brings them all back, or you can hit the tab key and it'll get rid of your side ones on the right on the left and bring them back. So whenever you want a little more, more real estate, get rid of all those things you're not using and just see your images. So what we're gonna be is in the lot were in the library module here, and we're in the import button here, So I'm clicking on the import button and there's a whole bunch of things I could do inside of the import dialog box and all of them bear mentioning here. So on the left hand side, this is where we're getting our images. This is the source up at the top. Here is what we can do to the photos. Now, If you were plugging in a card and that card popped up the import dialog box, it would ask you if you want to copy him if you want to move them from the card because it would have to actually take the photos off the card and put them somewhere on your hard drive, and that's what these options air for. But if you're not doing it from an external source, all you need to do is add them because, adding means, all I'm doing is looking at the files, seeing what they look like and drawing in that information and building previews. But I'm leaving the files exactly where they are. That is my preference, because my preference, as they mentioned, is that you know exactly where your files are at all times. That's critical to your workflow and to the file security of those images. So up top is what you're going to do with it, how you're going to get them, where into light room and then on the left hand side are all sorts of cool options for file handling and what to do with the images on the way in

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