Importing photos (2)

When you import photos Lightroom can render a preview of your photos in various ways.

Which preview rendering should you choose?
Well, if you want to display the previews in a hurry, choose one of the first two options.
If the previews should be accurate and of high quality, choose one of the lower two options.

When you choose “Minimal”, The photos will be displayed immediately with the smallest possible previews of the photographs.
If you choose the “Embedded and sidecar”, it displays the maximum possible images that are available from the camera. Thus the generation of the image previews is slower than with the “Minimal” option.
When you choose “Standard”, previews displayed are rendered by Lightroom. This standard size previews of the ProPhoto RGB color space are used.
When you choose for “1.1”, previews are displayed in a 100% display of the actual pixels.

What do we have in this window?

We have the checkbox “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” (1). It is best that you leave this selected, so that you can avoid importing duplicates.

You have the option to “Develop Settings” (2). This is only useful when you want to apply “Develop settings” to photos taken with a camera for which you have created as a “Develop preset”.

You have the option for “Metadata” (3). By clicking and selecting “New” opens a dialog where you can enter the basic information like the name of the author.

And you have the “Keywords” (4). In this box, you add the keywords you want to add to your photos to import. With these, it is always easy to determine the pictures when you later want to look for pictures with a theme.

Once all settings are entered and if you want to use them later for other pictures, you can save these settings.

Just click the double arrow at the bottom and select “Save Current Settings as New Preset …”.

In the window that appears you give these settings a name and click the OK button.

The next time you click the double arrow, you will see that the preferences are added to the list.

If all the photos that you wish to import are selected, click the “Import” button.

This brings us back to the library view where all the selected photos are imported.

A second way to import photos is to do this automatically by Lightroom.

Just click the button “File” in the menu bar, select “Auto Import” in the drop-down menu and click “Enable Auto Import”.

When this option is not available, you must first enter the settings above.

So click “Auto Import Settings”.

The first thing you should do, is to enter the “watched folder”. This folder must be empty.

The second thing you do in this dialog is, to enter a directory name to determine which directory you want to move these pictures to. You can also pick a subfolder.

If you place a photo of the “New Folder” into the “Empty Folder”, Lightroom will automatically place that image in the Lightroom catalog.

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