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Lesson Info

Importing Your Photos

Now we've got to main scenarios for imports. The first scenario is all the photos that are already on your hard drive. Okay? You just got, like room. But you've got five years of photos already. Those photos are already in the stacks. Okay? All we need to do is add the information to the light room catalogue. The other main scenario, of course, is new memory cards. New shoots that you come back with in the in that import. You need to copy the photos on your hard drive, put him into the stacks and add the information to the light room catalogue. So the first scenario we're going to do is the 1st 1 the photos air already on her hard drive. We just want to get him into light room so that we can enjoy them and work on them. So in the bottom left here, you're going to go ahead and click on this import button. And if you're import, dialog is really small is collapsed like this. Then you'll see this button. This downward arrow button to expand it out. Okay. Now, on the left hand side here, we...

're going to tell light room This whole left hand side is about telling light room where our photos are on a hard drive on a memory card. So, in this case, for the example, their inner pictures folder there already in our pictures folder. Now, sometimes you open this up and you won't see your pictures folder here. So how can you get to it first in this select a source box. Here. You have a few shortcuts for your convenience. Of course, pictures is one of them. So particularly if you don't remember that pictures is within Laura within users, you know, etcetera, etcetera. That can be a great way to get two pictures. But let me show you the but the long way around just so that you learn how to use this panel here first on this Mac hard drive. I'm Onley seeing my users. Holder. What if my photos were somewhere else? They weren't in my users folder like room doesn't seem to see that. Why doesn't it see it? Well, if I click on this downward triangle to the left of users right here to collapse users all of a sudden, it says Okay, now I'll show you everything. Okay. Now I can see all the other four bills on the hard drive. I can click on it Sideways triangle to go into one of them. Now, in fact, I do want to be in users, so I'll click on the sideways triangle to expand. I'll go into instructor here by clicking on the sideways triangle, and I'll go into pictures. So, like drunken, see your entire hard drive. Sometimes you just have to give it a little nudge for it to show it to you. So the photos are in this old photos folder in my pictures folder. So I'm gonna click on the sideways triangle to the left of it to expand it. And you can see that I have some year folders here. So actually, I this Mac technology have forgot about the fact that I could zoom in here. So in in 2000 and nine have got cap letters in 2010. I've got small letters now I have toe. Okay. All right. Now, if I click on the cap letters folder, I can see the photos. By the way, these air the best photos I've ever taken. So, you know, it's only downhill from here. I got to tell you. No, actually, I think these are These are the best ones. Okay, So and those of you that have taken a workshop with me or going Oh, no. Here the letters again. So Okay, so if I click on a folder, I see those photos in the folder. If there are some in here I don't want to import, I could uncheck thumb here by clicking on the check boxes. Frankly, I just import everything, and I sorted out in light room. Okay, Now, I can also double click on a photo to see it in what's called Loop You. So And in loop, you I could zoom in on the photo. I could click the check box, toe uncheck. I could hit the right arrow key to go to the next photo. But again, frankly, I don't do this kind of sorting through photos here in the import dialog. The library modules got even more tools. And right now I just want to get him into labor room. So I stay in what's called grid View here. Now I've selected the source, the cap letters, folder photos Now notice that I can also choose a higher level source. I could choose my entire 2009 folder here if I scroll up just a little bit on the left hand side. Notice that I'm saying include sub folders. So by selecting my 2009 folder, I'm getting cap letters and whatever else might be in there or I could select the entire old photos folder, So I get everything within that all of the sub folders now. Once I became comfortable with light room, I just selected the highest level folder and said, Bring them all in. I'm ready. Okay, so let's do that. Let's just go ahead and select old photos, which will bring in both of those sub folders. So we finally said where the photos are coming from, The next step in this top center is the click on add. We want to add them to the light room catalogue, and that's all we want to do. We don't want to copy them somewhere else on our hard drive or move them on our hard drive. We just want to add them to the catalogue, and frankly, even if they're not in exactly the right place on the hard drive because now I want everything in an Image Files folder. I'll do that in light room in the library module when I'm done with this process. So just add them to the catalogue. And then I've got some options here on the right hand side. These panels could be collapsed on your system, but any time you see a sideways triangle, you could just click on it to expand the panel. So they're a few settings here. I'll talk through the render previews. Remember, I said, that light room creates a few J peg copies of your photos. Those are called previews, and this decision here in import it's not mission critical. It just says when you want light room to create those Jay Peak copies. Do you wanna wait during the import process for it to create those JP copies, or do you want them copied? Lee are created later as needed, so minimal will create the thumbnail standard will create thumbnail and screen size Oneto. One will create all three. Now I just compromise. I say standard. What that means is when light room needs a oneto. One preview when I zoom in on a photo and it needs. It needs that largest Jay Peak copy. It's going to say loading as it creates that one toe. One copy. I would rather wait a second at that point rather than having the import dialog takes so long. But if you're willing to walk away from the import, maybe you want to build all the one toe once I love the don't import suspected duplicates. I almost always leave that check. The only time I would uncheck that is if you're trying to get everything into light room, all your duplicates so that you could sort through them and get rid of them. But generally, I don't want duplicates in my catalogue under developed settings here, what I could do, and I wouldn't in this scenario, but I just mentioned it is apply a light room preset. So, for example, I could bring in all of these photos and convert them the black and white as they come into light room. I don't really want to do that at this point, but you could have a preset that Well, I'm sorry. Let me talk a little bit more about that. When I get to a memory card, the metadata preset. We are going to set up. This will apply your copyrighted contact information to your photos or put it in the data that tags along with your photos. So it's great to set that up to automatically happen, so that if you export copies of her photos, the copyright information automatically goes with him. It doesn't get baked onto your photos. It's just in the data. So let's set up a metadata preset here. If I click on the drop down next to none, and I choose new and then up in the preset name, I'm gonna call this ls 2012. Copyright can't spell today and then down in the copyright section here, so just scroll down and in the copyright field, I'll put the copyright symbol. Mac users have it really easy. It's option G PC users. If you have a numeric keypad to the right of your keyboard, you could do hold the off key down and type 0169 Or you could pay sit in from the web. Or frankly, there's nothing wrong with simply doing, you know, left parentheses. See right parentheses. Okay, so now I gotta delete that. So I put in my name, I'll change the copyright status to copyright it for rights usage terms. I'm not an attorney, but I just put in all rights reserved. So you're just communicating to anyone who may come across your photos Now in the creator section, I would put your name again, and then I would put enough contact information that if anybody comes across your photos, they could get in touch with you so I wouldn't put anything that you would want to keep. Keep private. So I'm gonna go ahead and just put in my email or my website here, so I'll just go ahead and put my website and the last thing I'm doing is just scrolling down here to make sure that they're no check marks next to anything else in this preset dialogue. And I don't see any, so we're not accidentally including something else in the preset. So I just filled in the copyright section and the creator section, and then we'll click create. Now, this copyright preset will appear in the drop down from now on, okay? And by default, it will be selected. So you're it will just happen automatically in the keywords box here. I could type in keywords, but they have to be keywords, meaning terms I want to be able to search based on. They have to be Q words that apply to every single photo that I'm importing at this time. So that's more relevant to the memory card scenario. Where for Seattle shoot, I could put in Seattle. But when I'm importing all of my old photos on my hard drive, there's probably not gonna be any keywords that are relevant. Everything that's coming in at this point. So we've said where the photos air coming from on her hard drive radium to the catalogue, writing our copyright information and that that's really all there is to it. Okay, let's go ahead and click on the import button and you'll see it's importing the files and then it's rendering standard preview, so it's creating those Jay Peak copies. There's no need toe wait. While it's doing that process, the copyright information we did or where does that go? You said it doesn't get baked in or whatever it is, it get put into the metadata of the photos themselves. There's some sort of separate file or sidecars that only in the catalogue. Well, for now, I'm going to say it's in the catalogue Onley in the catalogue. It's definitely in the catalog. You can you can write it somewhere else that I get to later. But okay, let me just this. I have this photo selected here. We'll talk more about the metadata panel later, but if I scroll down on the right hand side here, all the way down to the metadata panel with this photo, select that I can see the copyright information there. And if I export exported a copy of this and I looked at the the the information in Finder on the photo or properties on the PC, I would see that information tagging along with the file. All right, Any questions at this point on this? Oh, I had a question on the 1 to 1 preview going back to the, um jpeg. Previous you can import. So if you don't check that 1 to 1 preview, will you have to sit through that loading every single photo or a light room? Work on that? Well, you only need a 1 to 1 preview if you zoom in on a photo in the library module. So if you don't zoom in on a photo, you never really need that. Now these aerial small J. Peg. So I'm not sure what's gonna happen. But if I go toe loop view and I hit so watch, it may happen quickly. If I hit the zoom, it happened so quickly I didn't see load. But generally I would see that it's loading in our next exercise. You'll see that happen, so it just creates it. Then, Laura along those lines, Sam Cox is asking 1 to thumbnails. Take up a lot of disk space. So does Light Room ever automatically discovered those large thumbnails? That's definitely an important thing to do and will set preferences to do that. Thank you. Another question from the ingenuity. Who asks, Would it not be better to have the metadata copyright baked into the photo rather than just a catalogue of someone without light room opens the photo? Will they see the cop? Well, when you export copies of your photo, it will tag along with the photo. So that's the That's the first. The first answer. The second answer. Um, I'll get into in a little bit. Some people some people know about ex MP files the tag along with your raw files. So if you send out one of those, you can have white room right out your work to these ex MP files as well. So when I get into catalog settings, I'll bring that up. But just know that on export things will tag along unless you choose in the export dialog to not include that information. All right, so let's do the second import. And then I think it will be time for a break. So we're going Teoh through the second scenario, importing from a memory card just got back from a shoot. We're excited. We want to bring the photos in, so let's go ahead and click on import again. Now, if you have a memory card plugged in, it will show up at the top of the source panel here, so it will probably automatically be selected. But if not, you would just click on it to select it. I don't have a memory card plugged in for the sake of the you know, the studio class. Here are photos air in a different place. We're pretending that they're on a memory card. So where they really are is on our desktop. So for the studio audience here, I want you to click on this, select a source here and go to your desktop. And then within the desktop folder, I want you toe open the sample photos folder by clicking on the sideways triangle next to sample photos and then also open the day one folder. So let's start with the memory card Headshots. Shoot. So click on the memory card headshots folder here. So this is, uh, I've actually stolen these photos from a very talented Seattle photographer, John Cornyn. Cello. Uh, his courage curiously allowed me to use them. The's were from his creativelive workshop on setting up a studio in your home so I'd encourage you. Teoh, check out that that very popular workshop. But he's a great guy, and I appreciate his contribution here, So we've just gotten back. We just finished this shoot. We've We've selected it from selected the memory card on the left side source panel and then in the top center. We're not just gonna add them to the catalog, right? We need to copy the mantra or hard drive And if this was a real memory card, it wouldn't even let you. It would force you to copy. So we have two choices. So this is copying them into the stacks. We can copy them in their current format, which would be as a shape peg as a Canon CR two raw file and any F file you know, any proprietary raw file or if they are raw files. We can also choose to copy as DMG. So I know a lot of you are wondering about Should I just copy them as they are? Should I convert them to DMG? DMG is adobes raw file format. It has some advantages over leaving them in your camera proprietary format. But I have to say that it's just not a mission critical decision, and we could spend an hour talking back and forth discussing whether to do it or not. But I don't sweat it. You know, I have started copying minus tng, but I still don't see it. His mission critical Just toe quickly go over some of the advantages. Uh, the files will be a little bit smaller, so maybe 10% smaller. You don't lose any information it's lossless compression. You. If you convert them to DMG with light room four, you have the ability to set a setting that will allow light room to embed a preview in that DMG file that will make them load faster in the develop module. So for those of you that have already worked in the develop module, when you select a photo, you may sit there while it loads. Depends on your machine, of course. So if you embed that fast low data in a D and G, which you can't do in a cannon are, are there other raw file format they can load faster in the develop module? Now? It started out with the main advantage being that adobes. Raw file format is open Source There are no secrets. Any company can support them from now, you know into into the future forever. The theory is that, as I understand it is that let's just say Cannon goes out of business or Nikon goes out of business, and those files there is some proprietary features to them. There's some secrets in there. So will other companies be able to support them? If one of these companies go out goes out of business. I don't That isn't a big concern to me. Frankly, if that happens, I can convert to DMG. Then it's just not not a compelling argument for me, but it's these additional photographer workflow features that arm or important saving space embedding the fast, low data and then the 3rd 1 is that for those of you that know what X and P files are as you choose to write out your light from work not only to the catalog but out to the raw file not to bake it in, but just to tag along with it. If you have a cannon or a Nikon file, that light room work sits in a little sidecar file called an ex MP file. You open up a folder, you'll see a CR two file or in any of file and an ex MP file. Not a big deal. I just ignore him there, just there. But if you have a DMG, that information gets written into the DMG, so it's all bundled neatly together. So a lot of people like DMG, for that reason this well, so I'm not going to choose. Copy is DMG at this point because the one disadvantage, Well, first of all, these air J pegs, But if they were raw files, the disadvantage of copping a CNG is that it takes a while to convert, so your imports will take longer. You can always convert in the library module later. That's another option. But for the sake of class, I'm just gonna choose copy. And because they are J picks. Okay, so that was a long sidetrack there. But we've said they're coming from the memory card. Were copying them to the hard drive. Now, over on the right hand side, I can assign a lot of information, but I'm going to scroll down to the mission. Critical piece first. Okay, that's the destination panel. This is where newer users that either you don't get here or, you know, people don't understand what's going on here. You're Fuller's end up organized by date. You're not sure why they end up in places that you're not sure how the heck they got there, and then when you're in the library module, you can't even really tell where they are. So So the destination panel is the critical one to talk about. So where on her hard drive. Do we want this shoot to go? So the first thing I'm gonna do is I have my pictures folder selected by default here. But if I didn't, I would use this dialogue to select my pictures folder. Now, I actually want my photos in an Image Files folder within pictures. Remember, Pictures is gonna have both image files and the catalog, so I want to create that Image Files folder. It's not here yet. Now. I believe if I right click on pictures here, I could do this outside of light room. But I'll go ahead right, click on pictures and say, Create new folder. Now it's a little confusing because that doesn't create a new folder. But in this finder or Windows Explorer dialogue that comes up, I can click on new folder here, and I can type image files and I create. Now, if you're on Windows Explorer, the button would be up here of the top. So now I have image files. Now I can say choose and light room now has an image files folder within pictures, so I'm set up for the future. Now. Now, my selection here the folder that's highlighted is going to be image files. But you know, I don't want to dump the photos straight into image files, right? I want to put them in a shoot folder within a year folder. So that's the part I'm gonna let light from. Help me with. I'm not gonna manually create all of that. What I'm gonna do is at the top of the destination panel here. I'm not gonna organize into one folder, and I'll get to that scenario with a different memory card. I'm gonna organized by date. So if you're wondering why I have my photos been organized by date up till now, it's because that's probably was the light from default toe organized by date. But that's a choice you want to consciously make now. Notice that as soon as I did that down here in the destination panel light room shows me in a Tallix exactly what it's creating. So it's creating this 12 2001 Ken folder within 2012 within image files now of 2012 already existed. It would simply put them in there. It wouldn't have to created a second time. Now, up here under organized by date. Click on the drop down and look at the fact that you've got many date formats here, and they all look pretty similar right now. The key to avoiding frustration is to recognize what the slash means the slash means sub folder. So if I choose this 1st 1 which is what I usually choose, I'm getting a date folder within a year folder exactly what I want. But if I went down to this one here, the 2012 slash three slash 29 I would end up with a date folder within a month folder within a year folder. So just make sure you're making a conscious choice on that. Go ahead and choose the 1st 1 So now I've got exactly what I want. Now I encourage people when you're new to importing, realize that there's no rush to hit the import button. Take your time here and always look for these folders in italics and make sure that they are, in fact, sitting in the right folder. If I select pictures here instead of image files, notice that my photos I can see right away that my photos air going there and I know that's wrong. Okay, so I can fix it right now rather than after the fact. So I select image files organized by date. I'm in great shape. Okay, so we said where they're coming from, we're copying them to a new location. And we're comfortable with the destination panel that we put them exactly where we want to put them. So now the rest of it is just kind of icing on the cake. Okay, We have the choice in the file handling section here to make a second copy to another hard drive now, so that could be an immediate backup. I personally don't use this dialogue here. What I would do is check it and I would click right here and say where I want those backups to go. I don't use it because that those backups do not mimic the folder structure of my primary drive. So it's not gonna be pictures. Image files year shoot. It's just gonna be a folder that says imported on January 29th. So it's it's up to you. You could still use it as another hard drive. That's just an archive of originals. But don't think of it as your primary backup to restore from because things they're not going to be in the folder structure you need them to be in. You also have the choice to to rename your files as you're importing them. So these files actually have already been renamed So studio Session 20 to dodge a PG. But normally our camera files are I am G 59. You can rename them here. If you click on this template, you'll see that the light room team has built some can solutions here, for example, we could choose custom name sequence, and in this custom text box, we would type a description. So this could be John's John's shoot, and it will. It will be junk shoot and then a sequence number, starting with the start number here, which we say one and noticed that at the bottom of that dialogue you have a sample. It tells you exactly what the name of that first photo is gonna be. So again, you can see if you're making a mistake. Um, in the process. Now, the downside of doing this here is that people type I type and John shoot, and the next time I do an import, I forget that it's still says John's shoot. So I got John shoots on months of photos, and I know a lot of people do. This is not just may okay or you choose custom named Sequence, but you forget to type in anything. So guess what all of your photos are untitled. 123456 Okay, so if it if you want to keep it simple, you may choose not to rename your files Over time is your camera turns over in its file numbering. You'll end up with duplicate file numbers to image 23 40 nines. But they'll be in different shoot folders. So for a lot of that, a lot of us that's not critical for me. I don't care. It really depends on you know, some professionals. They need to make sure that every single file is unique because their stock agency or their clients are communicating exactly based on file number, and so they absolutely have to rename their files. So all right now, I think I've covered most of the rest of this. I want to talk a little bit, brakes, a break time, a little bit about this applying a preset at import because if I deploy, I'm or to a memory card scenario. So let's say I tend to like fairly punchy photos, So I tend to always add maybe 20 points of contrast in 10 points, a saturation as a starting point. If that's the case in the develop module, I could create a preset, the bumps up contrast in saturation and here in the import dialog it will show in the drop down. And I can apply it right as I'm importing so that my photos automatically come in closer toe what I like. Now, when I get to the develop module, I can still change my mind to fine tune them. But it can save me time on my starting point. Okay, now, in this case, we just have a single shoot. So let's add a few key words in here. Let's add Seattle notice that as I start typing, it completes the words because Seattle is already in this light room catalogue and, uh, portrait and we'll their studio. So I'm separating keywords with commas. Whether I have spaces in there as well as the common doesn't matter or not. It's the Commons that air the critical part. And again, these are keywords that apply to every photo in the shoot. So there are different people in here, so I'm not gonna put the models names because I don't want, you know, Troy on all of the models photos in here, and then we're finally ready to import. So we've said where the photos are coming from, we're copying them. We're adding some keywords. Copyright information will automatically be added. Since I've stolen these photos from John, we'll put my copyright on them. Yeah, and that will go ahead and hit import. In your recommendations, you suggested having the shoot name is part of the folder name. Is there a place to put that here, or do we have to kind of go do that after the fact? That's the one thing we're gonna do before break, which is great, because you just remind me so That's perfect. All right, So these were being imported. It's rendering the previews. We can go ahead and keep going here. Now, I'll give you a broader orientation later, but the catalogue section up here in the top left shows you all of the photographs you've imported, the light room knows about. And then the folders panel shows you the same photos based on where they are in your hard drive. So now that we've imported the photos, we should see those those of the photos from the shoot. So in my case, there on my Mac hard drive here and I see a 2012 folder, but it's collapsed. So it's hiding the shoot folder from me. But if I click on this sideways triangle right here, I can see this January 10th folder. If I select that fact, those of the photos Well, I frankly don't think a folder name of January 10th is very useful. It makes me, it means makes the folders panel pretty useless to me. So as soon as I do an import from a memory card, the next thing I dio is I find the folder here. I right click on it, and I say rename. And if there are two words, I'm going to say more than any words in this entire three days, it's gonna be right. Click, because if you're in doubt how to do something in light room, chances are if you right click. You're gonna find it. Now, if you have a one button Mac Mouse, you're going to do a control click. So right, click and save rename. And I'm not gonna wipe out the date. I'm gonna click at the end and I'm gonna type, um, John Studio shoot or whatever the description might be, And then I'll click save. So all of a sudden, the folders panel actually becomes a way that I can get to my photos so that folders set up does not mirror your hard drive. Is there a way to organize those? So it does. Well, it's just kind of hiding information from you here. It's trying, Teoh. You know, it's It's like when you import something, um, people import photos, and but they don't understand where they are, you know, because, like, Justin isn't telling you, it's holding out on you. Okay, so you need to wrestle some more information from it. So the next thing that we're gonna do before break is so I know this 2012 folder is not straight on my Mac hard drive. It's within image files within pictures. So I want to see that and I need to see that. So I'm going to right click on 2012 because I want to see the next highest level folder. I'm going to right Click on 2012 and I'm gonna say in light room four, I'm going to say show parent folder a light room two or light from three. I would say add parent folder and OK, now I can see 2012 lives with an image files. I'm starting to feel a little bit more comfortable about where things are. So now I'm gonna right click on image files and I'm gonna say show parent folder. Now I can see that image files lives within pictures. Now, I could right click on pictures to see that it lives within instructor within users. But I don't care about that level of information. As long as I can see my entire photo library. I'm a piece. So So thanks for reminding me about that. Now, once you've done this once, you're not gonna have to do it after every import this will automatically show. Okay, Okay. Yeah. If you shoot j peg plus raw, you get two files for every time you click the shutter. Sometimes my J picks do look different because I might use a monochrome mode when I'm shooting. So when I'm checking our own checking that select are suspected duplicates. Will I get to know that's That's different, that's all talk about. They want to get to the preferences, but that's not to eliminate that J. Peg with a rock.