Lightroom CC: In Depth: Importing

Lesson 1: Set Up For Success
Published: April 2015 with Scott Kelby

Duration: 49 minutes

About Course

As part of our in-depth look at Lightroom CC, join Scott Kelby as he takes you through an up close look at the import process. Getting started on the right foot is the key to success with Lightroom, so Scott gives you strategies that will help you move forward with confidence by avoiding the most common pitfalls that new Lightroom users encounter. From there you'll learn the ins and outs of every panel and function on the Import dialog as Scott shows you the different options for getting your photos into Lightroom.

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Hi guys, Scott Kelby and welcome to Lightroom CC In Depth. This is importing, we are going to dedicate a whole entire class to just getting your images into Lightroom and there is actually more to it than you think and a lot of options, a lot of power here and we can make it as simple or complex as you want to we're going to cover both ways, but before we actually get into doing the day to day stuff, I want to set you up for success from the very beginning. I want you to be really successful with your Lightroom experience so, what I recommend to do is first, I would strongly recommend that you store your images on an external drive, especially if you're working on a laptop, or even if you're working on a desktop machine because at some point you're going to have so many images that you're going have to move your images to something else, so first off I think a great strategy is to store your images on an external drive, the bigger the drive the better, so that's step one, you've got to do that. You've got to get your images on an external drive, you're going to thank me later, the second part is, and this is really key, this is the thing where, when I run into people and I'm out on my live seminar and they tell me they're having Lightroom problems it all starts at this one thing, if you do this right now, your life will be, your Ligthroom life will be a breeze, even if you've already done it the wrong way before and now you want to fix it, here's how to keep your life completely organized in Lightroom, number one, you have to put all of your photos in one big folder. Inside that folder you can have as many sub folders as you want, but on this drive you should have one folder you can call whatever you want photos, my photos, Lightroom photos, whatever, that's your main folder. Inside of that, many photos as you want, if you do that and by the way you've already done it in a different way, that's okay, get an external hard drive, create a new folder and drag all of your images into that, once they're all in one single place, well, number one, there's an advantage they are all in one, single place. They're all in one single folder and to back up your entire library of images, it's just dragging one folder from one drive to another right? So that's benefit number one but once they are in there, then all of your images will be managed correctly from the start, you'll thank me, you will send me emails, people do it all the time and say, thank you so much for getting my life in order so that's number one, so I'm going to go ahead and do that, I have an external drive here, we're going to pop it open, I'm going to add a new folder right here and we're going to call this, just photos, or you can call it, my photos, there you go, so all my photos are going to be somewhere inside this one folder. I might see 100, 150, 200, 300, 500 folders inside of there, but they're all in that one, alright that's the first thing. That's the first step. Now, the first thing we're going to cover here and I think this is really important, is the easiest way, especially if you are brand new to Lightroom like you've just started, I would strongly recommend this way but I know so many photographers that do this from here on out so it's not the baby way, not the beginner way but it is a very, very easy way to know exactly where your images are. Do you know that's one of the biggest problems people have with Lightroom they are like, [xx] imported stuff, I'm not quite sure where it is. If you want to know exactly where your stuff is? Here's what you do. So I have a memory card here, got a card reader attached to my camera. I could use Lightroom's import dialogue box and have it automatically copying stuff, but I'm going to recommend to you that you don't do that. I'm going to recommend first, especially if you're new to instead pop your card in your computer, go to your memory card. Let's go to the memory card right up here. Find your images. Here they are right here. These are the images from my shoot. Make a folder inside your big folder, we'll call it catalog shoot and drag your images into that folder, so we are not even in Lightroom yet we're just doing this like a on our computer, doesn't even matter if you have launched Lightroom yet just recap what I did, put my card in the camera, found my images from the shoot, I created a new folder inside my big photos folder and dragged them in there. Is there any question at this point where images are? No! You know exactly where they are. They are on your external hard drive. They are inside a folder called photos, and inside there you can see they are in a folder called catalog shoot. You know exactly where your photos are, now that you know where your photos are they are not going to move, they are not going to to change, they will always be right there. We just going to let Lightroom manage them so here is what you would do next, let's go to Lightroom. We are going to go to the Import function, now you can do this from a library module, there is little button called Import over here on the left hand side, bottom left corner, import or you can use the keyboard shortcut, on a Mac it would be Shift+ Command+I. On Windows it would be Shift+Ctrl+I that brings up the Import dialogue. Now, all you're going to do is make sure over here that folder, your external hard drive, there it is my external hard drive, there is my photos folder right and then there, there's that catalogue, there it is. So this is [xx] you can see I clicked on my external hard drive, there's my photos folder, this is the catalogue shoot, I just stuck on there. All I have to do is hit import, that's it, all my images are in Lightroom and now I can work with them. This is such an easy way, this makes so much sense because you know exactly where your images are even though Lightroom kind of knows where they are and managing it they don't move, on your external drive. I know I'm beating this to death but it's because this is the thing that people have so much trouble with when you start moving stuff around, start dragging folders from location to location that's when you get in trouble with Lightroom, this way everything is right is where it should be from the start.Now we are going through the entire in the rest of this class we are going to look through the entire importing dialogue and there maybe a point that once you are totally comfortable with where your images are and you know exactly where they are then you always maybe want to use the other one, but for now lets get started with this its so simple and so easy. Let's start by dragging our images from the card to our external drive and then we just bring them into Lightroom. There we go that's our start, now let's dig in a little deeper and go into actually how the import dialog works.

Scott Kelby

Scott is the President and CEO of KelbyOne, is also the original "Photoshop Guy", is the editor and publisher of Photoshop User Magazine, Conference Technical Chair for the Photoshop World Conference, Training Director and instructor for KelbyOne Live Seminars, and author of a string of bestselling technology and photography books.