Lightroom 4 - Importing and Organizing Your Images

[Getting Started with ADOBE PHOTOSHOP LIGHTROOM 4] [♪♪] Hi and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost. [Julieanne Kost - Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist] In this video we're going to discover the most efficient ways to import your images into Lightroom and organize them. We're going to begin in the library. The library is where you import your images and also where we're going to narrow down the edit, pick the images that we like, add metadata, create collections, things like that-- things that will help us to organize our photographs. In other videos we'll talk about the Develop module, where we'll perfect our images. And then we'll move to the Output modules. So the thing to know is that Lightroom is very workflow-oriented. You work through the different modules to complete your tasks. And every time you click on a different module you see different panels for that module that are giving you the tools that you need to do those tasks. Down here at the bottom we also have a toolbar, and below that we have our filmstrip. As soon as we import some images, the filmstrip will be filled with photographs. And the great thing about that is as I move from module to module, I'll be able to reference that filmstrip. Let's go ahead and start by importing some files. When I talk to photographers, they usually choose 1 of 2 different ways to import their images. They're either going to import their images directly from their card or they'll manually copy the images from the card to their computer and then they'll just want to import from a certain location on their hard drive. So we'll walk through both scenarios. First we'll walk through importing from a card. You can see that the card automatically appears in the Import dialog box, and I have the choice to either copy these files and convert them as DNG or simply copy them. For now we'll just copy them. You can see the images. They appear here in the Grid view. If you wanted to view an image larger, simply double click on it and it will bring it up in Loop view. There are 2 icons right down here that will take you back and forth. So if you wanted to return to Grid view, simply click the icon or you can tap the G key for grid and the E key for loop. I want to import all of these files, but there might be a time when you don't want to, in which case you could uncheck the images then simply click on the first image and then either Command click to select additional images-- that would be the Control key on Windows-- or hold down the Shift key in order to select a sequence of images. And then you could simply click in the little check mark area here in order to tell Lightroom to import those files. You can see that the images below that would not be imported. But in this case I want to import them all, so I'll click Check All. We can also change the thumbnail size here if we wanted to see these thumbnails smaller or larger. All right. Let's take a look at all of the different options we have when we import images. If we want to see these images as quickly as possible, then we're going to set the Render Previews to Minimal. We can set it to Standard, in which case that would take a little bit longer, but it tells Lightroom to put the priority on rendering larger thumbnails. For now we'll go with the speed and set it to Minimal. I don't want to import suspected duplicates. Let's say, for example, I had the card in my camera and photographed 20 images, downloaded those 20, and then continued shooting on that same card without reformatting. There's no reason to bring in those first 20 images again, so I'll go ahead and leave that checked on. If I want to make a backup to a secondary location at the time that I import, I'll want to check on the option to Make a Second Copy To, and then I can use the little disclosure triangle right here to choose a folder to make a copy. When I import, I can also choose to rename my files. Some photographers want to rename right now, and some will wait until they get into the Library module and rename. It really depends on your renaming template. For example, I have a sequence and I use a sequence that goes on throughout the whole year. Other people just have a sequence per client. Because my sequence flows throughout the whole year, I don't rename right now on import because I throw away a lot of images, and if I throw away a lot of images and they were already renamed, then I would have gaps in my sequence. But that's just because I'm very tidy. You'll choose to do it whatever way you want. If you do want to rename your files, you can create a template. There are a lot of templates here that we ship by default. One of my favorites is probably the Custom Name plus a Sequence. What that allows me to do is enter in a client name, and then Lightroom will automatically start the sequence at 1, although I could change that if I want to. I also have created my own custom template by selecting the Edit option and then clearing out everything here and adding the options that I want. You can either insert from any of these options or you can type right directly in this space. So let's say, for example, I wanted to rename all of my files JKOST_ and then I want the year, but I don't want to type in the year. I actually want Lightroom to get the year that the photo was taken from the EXIF data in the image. So right down here under Additional you can see we have lots of different formats. Some people will want to put not only the year but also maybe the month and the day. For me I'm just going to insert the year right now, so we'll go ahead and click Insert. Then I'm also going to add a sequence number. So from the Numbering area I'll choose a sequence. Because my sequence goes on all year, I'm going to select from the largest option here. Sometimes it gets a little bit confusing when you've got the date or the year here and then the sequence. so I'm just going to put another underscore right between those. This would be my custom file naming convention. In order to save that, I would choose from the preset here and then save my current settings as new preset. For now I'm going to call this my demo preset. And I'll click Create. When I select Done, you can see that over here in the File Renaming area the template is now set to Demo Preset and we see a sample underneath that. All right. Let's close these 2 panels before we look at what we want to apply during import. There are 3 different things you can apply, but remember, everything you apply right now will be applied to all of the images when you import. All of it you could change later, but the reason that I point it out is that you want to be very general with what you apply. For example, if you wanted all of these images to have a certain look, like maybe you want to convert them to black and white, then you could choose from your Develop settings, go to one of the Lightroom default settings, and select whatever look you want. I've created a custom setting so that when I shoot landscapes I actually have a preset that adds a little bit of saturation and a little bit of a tone curve to add a little bit of contrast. And I created that in the Develop module, so we'll cover that in a different video. For now I'll just leave this set to None. In the Metadata area, this is where you want to create a preset. You can see that I have some created right here. The way you would create that is you would just select Edit Presets, and then I'm going to cheat a little in the demo and I'm going to go select one of these presets so it auto fills the information that I want. For example, on all of my images I want to enter in a copyright, copyright status, my copyright URL, and all of this creator information. I probably wouldn't want to add something like a rating or a caption unless that rating and caption applied to all of the images. Since I haven't made any changes, I don't really need to save this, but just like we saw in the file renaming presets, you can save your settings as a new preset so that once you set this all up you never have to come back here and redo it. All right. For now I'm going to click Done since we didn't make any edits to my preset for my metadata. Then we can also enter in keywords. So again, you want to be very general here. You don't want to add a keyword like Cloud because not all of the images have clouds. But all of these images were taken in Ireland, so I can add that as a keyword. Moving down to the Destination, because I'm copying these files from my card onto my hard drive, I need to tell Lightroom where I want those files to be. I'm going to go to my desktop. One of the great things here is that you can actually dock any folder, because otherwise sometimes this whole folder structure gets too long. So if I just double click the word Desktop, you can see how it kind of tucks all of the other folders that I'm not using away. So now I'll go down to the Lightroom 4 Getting Started folder. I have a folder called ImageVault, 2011, and I want to copy these images into the Ireland folder. So I'll go ahead and select that, and then I can tell it to put it into a subfolder if I wanted to. We'll name this the Dingle Peninsula. You can see down below that it will preview what that folder will look like and where it's placed. You could also organize this into folders by date, but for me it just makes more sense to put them in 1 folder based on, basically, the content of the images. It's easier for me to remember that I went to a certain location than it is for me to remember what date I went to that location on. Excellent. Just 2 more things I want to point out here. For one, I can eject my card after I import, so that's just a nice little feature. And if I wanted to, if I was always going to import this way, probably the best thing that I could do is actually create a preset right down here. You can see I have 2 presets, 1 preset to import from my card to my New Photographs folder, and another one to add to the catalog in place. All right. Let's go ahead and import these files. In the Catalog area, as the images are imported we get a count of all the photographs in my catalog as well as the number of images that are coming in in the current import. Below that, you can see in the Folders structure we have those images being added into that specific folder. And if we wanted to see where those images were on the hard drive, we can simply select any image here in the Grid view, right mouse click or Control click on Mac, and then say Show in Finder or Show in Explorer. So as you can see here, I've got a folder called Dingle Peninsula on my hard drive, and all of those images are inside of it. So at any point in time when you're in Lightroom, you can quickly see where your images are on the hard drive. So there's no mystery there. Wherever you copied your images, that's where they're going to live on your hard drive. The other way that photographers commonly import files is they won't actually use Lightroom to import them; instead they will connect their card reader, and they will manually grab the images from that drive and drag them to a specific location, and then they'll use Lightroom to simply add those files to a catalog. Let's look at that scenario. I'm going to click Import again, but this time we're going to navigate to a folder on my desktop. So in the Source area I'll click to select the desktop, then we'll go to the Lightroom 4 Getting Started folder inside my ImageVault, 2011, Ireland. And you can see that I have 2 other folders here that have images in them. I'm going to turn off the option to include subfolders so that I'm only seeing the contents of these 2 folders. I have manually copied the images from 2 other cards, created these folders in the operating system, and copied the photographs into those 2 folders. So I don't need to copy them up here across the top. I simply want to add them to the Lightroom catalog. Basically, I want to make Lightroom aware of these images. I don't have quite as many options when I follow this workflow, but I still can use the same File Handling and Apply During Import options. Here again I could type in Ireland, but I don't want to be too specific because some of these images were taken in the Cliffs of Moher and some of them in Holy Island. And that's fine because it's very easy to add keywords after the fact when you're in the Library module. All right. So let's go ahead and import these images. It's going to be much quicker to import the images this way because the images are already on my hard drive. I don't have to copy the images from a card, so it just comes across much more quickly. If we look at the Catalog area, you can see now that if I look at all of my photographs, this is going to include not only the ones we just imported but also the ones from the Dingle Peninsula that came off the card. We can look at just the previous import if we want to look at that subset, or we can go down to the Folder area and we can look at each folder individually. I notice that this folder, the Cliffs of Moher, if I scroll down there are a lot of very, very similar images, and that's because I photographed a time lapse sequence here. So what I would like to do is I would like to actually select all of these images in the Grid view, so I'll click on one and then scroll down here to the end, hold down my Shift key, and click on that last one to select it, because I want to put these in their own folder, and that's very easy to do in Lightroom. Using the + icon right here, I can add a subfolder inside a folder-- in this case it would go inside the Cliffs of Moher-- or I could add a folder anywhere. I could add a folder on this internal drive, I could add a folder on an external drive, wherever you want to place these images. For now we'll just add a subfolder, and I'll name this Time Lapse, and we'll include the selected photos. When I hit Create, Lightroom is actually moving those files on disk. So if we use the disclosure triangle right here, you can see I've got the Cliffs of Moher and the Time Lapse folder. And in fact, if I select an image and again we right mouse click on it to show that in Finder or show in Explorer, you can see that I have a folder. Let's change my view here so we can just see the Time Lapse folder, which is inside of the Cliffs of Moher. So anything you do in the Folder structure as far as making new folders or moving files between folders, what you do in the Folder structure in Lightroom you are actually doing on your hard drive. So if you want to create new folders, I would recommend that you do that within Lightroom and move your images around using the Folder structure right here. One of the things that some folks find a little puzzling is if they click on the top folder here, this parent folder, the Cliffs of Moher, you'll notice that you can still see all of the images that are in that subfolder, and that is not typically the way that an operating system works. The reason that we show it this way is because we have an option on underneath the Library menu to show photos in subfolders. So not only are we seeing what's in the Cliffs of Moher folder, but we're also seeing what's inside that Time Lapse folder. If I turn this off, now you'll notice that when I view the Cliffs of Moher folder, those are the only images that I see. And if I go to the Time Lapse folder, those will be the only images that I see. All right. I just wanted to point that out. I also want to point out if I wanted to see what the parent folder was for Cliffs of Moher, the Dingle Peninsula, and Holy Island, I can do that by simply right mouse clicking or, again, Control clicking on the Mac and asking Lightroom to show the parent folder. And what it does is it will automatically import the parent folder. It's not going to automatically import all the other subfolders that might live in that parent folder because you haven't told it to do that. You just basically told Lightroom that you want to get a better perspective of where these 3 folders are by seeing the parent folder. And of course if we right mouse click and we go and view this in the Finder, we can see that, sure enough, there's a folder called Ireland and there are those 3 subfolders right inside of it. The reason that the folder is set to 0 is because, remember, we turned off the Show Photos in Subfolders. If I turn that back on, now we get the total photo count here of 187, and we can see all of the images that we've imported in all of the subfolders of that Ireland folder. All right. Two last things just to point out. When we do select an image, you'll notice over here in Keywording that we've got the Ireland keyword, so that was applied on import. If I want to add another keyword, I simply select the files I want to add the keyword to and then I click right here to add that keyword. So for example, I can add the keyword Fern and then hit Return and it will apply that keyword. In addition, if I select an image and we scroll down and look in the Metadata panel, you can see that all of my copyright metadata has been added right here. So there you go. That's a quick overview of how you import and organize your images in the Library module in Lightroom 4. I'm Julieanne Kost. Thanks for watching. [ADOBE PHOTOSHOP LIGHTROOM 4] [Crew - Kush Amerasinghe, Erik Espera, Karl Miller] [Presenter - Julieanne Kost - tv.adobe.com/evangelist/julieanne-kost] [ADOBE TV]