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[Lightroom for Travel Photography] [♫]
Whenever you're taking pictures while traveling,
whether you're on a trip that was designed expressly for the purpose
of capturing photographic images
or you're just on vacation and you're capturing snapshots along the way,
it can be very helpful to stay organized while you're actually on that trip.
You can do that with the help of Lightroom if you're traveling with a laptop.
Of course, the same basic principles apply if you wait until you return home
to process your images.
In this case, I'm going to operate under the assumption
that I'm currently on a photography trip and I want to organize my images
and maybe share some of them while I'm traveling.
To get started, I want to import my images into the Lightroom catalog.
When I'm traveling, I actually start off with a brand-new catalog
so I have a clean environment with which to work with only
the images from the current trip.
So I'll go ahead and get started by clicking the import button
at the bottom of the left panel in the library module.
That will bring up the import dialog, and because I've already inserted a digital media card
into my card reader, Lightroom has detected that card reader.
So we can already see previews of the images that I'm ready to import.
I don't actually even need to set a source in this case; it's been set for me.
Note that I have an option to eject after import,
so that as soon as the import process is complete,
the card will be ejected so that I can remove it from the drive,
put it back in my camera, and reformat it so that I can use it again
to capture new images.
The next step is to choose which operation we're going to use.
We can copy and convert to DNG.
We can simply copy the images to a new location.
We could move the photos to a different location.
Or, we can leave the images where they are and simply add them to the Lightroom catalog.
Since I'm working with images that are currently on a digital media card from my camera,
I most certainly want to copy those images.
So I'll use the copy option.
Note that we can choose which specific images will be imported
as part of this process.
By default, all of the images are selected for import.
We could, in theory, review the images right now and turn off the check box
for any images that we feel we don't really want to import.
But my preference is to get the images copied to my computer
as quickly as possible so that I have a backup copy of those images.
I like to know that they're safe and sound on my hard drive.
The next step is to choose the destination: where are we going to copy these images to?
In this case, I'm working with my internal hard drive on my laptop computer,
and so I'm going to copy the images into the pictures folder on that hard drive.
Naturally, I want to organize all of the photos from this trip
into a single folder, but at the moment, I'm simply going to specify my pictures folder.
This could also be an external hard drive, but I want to identify the primary location--
that top-level location where I'm going to copy photos.
A little bit later, I'll specify the particular folder that I'm going to place these images into.
We can then take a look at the various file-handling options
over on the right panel in the import dialog.
First we have the render previews option,
and you'll see that we have several options available to us.
Because I want to be able to process my images,
to review the images and identify my favorites, for example,
I typically use the standard option.
With the minimal or embedded and sidecar options, the import processing
will occur a little bit faster, but then when I'm navigating among my images
I might need to wait for a preview to render.
I prefer to be able to work a little bit more quickly after the fact,
and so I use that standard option.
In most cases, I don't need to zoom in on every single photo,
and so I don't utilize the 1:1 option.
That will take a fair amount of time, and it will also consume a fair amount of hard drive space.
So, to me, the standard option is a great compromise.
I also turn on the option to not import suspected duplicates.
In the context of travel photography, this usually implies that I've
inserted a digital media card where I've already downloaded
some of the photos from that card.
For example, I download images from a card, put it back in the camera,
forget to reformat that card, and capture additional images on the card.
Turning on the don't import suspected duplicates check box
is a great way to protect from that situation
so that you don't inadvertently end up with multiple copies of some of your photos.
I also strongly encourage you to take advantage of the option
to back up the images during the import process.
All you need to do is turn on the check box to make a second copy,
and then you can click the summary link and navigate to a location
where you'd like to store the backup photos.
In this case, I have an external hard drive attached to my laptop.
It's called Photoback, because I use it for backing up my photos.
I'll go ahead and choose that as the location for the backup,
and now all of my images that I'm going to import from my digital media card
onto my internal hard drive via Lightroom will also be copied to this second location.
So I'll have a backup created as part of my import process.
Next we have the file renaming section.
Here we can turn on a check box if we'd like to rename the files
as we download them from our digital media card.
You can see, of course, that the camera assigns a file name
that's not exactly all that useful.
It's not very meaningful, and so it can be helpful to use
a more descriptive file name for your photos.
So with the rename files check box turned on,
we can choose a template from the pop-up.
I typically use the custom name and sequence number option,
but the default option here does not include leading zeroes for the numbering.
So I'm going to choose the edit option to bring up the file name template editor,
and I'm going to remove that sequence number.
I'll just press delete there, and from the pop-up under numbering
I'm going to choose the option that includes some leading zeroes.
This will help ensure that all of my images are sequenced properly
when I sort by file name, since I tend to take a lot of images on each trip.
So I'll choose that option, and then to save that change
I'll click the preset pop-up and choose to update that current preset.
I'll go ahead and click Done, and now we can see that those leading zeroes
will be included in the new file names.
I can then type custom text for the file name.
In this case, the images were captured in Austria,
so I'll just type Austria.
You can see now that I have a sample file name that includes the word Austria
and then a sequence number for each of the images.
I could also specify a starting number,
but in this case I'm just getting started on this trip,
so we'll start with number 1.
I can then scroll down to the apply during import section.
Here we have develop settings, so if I wanted to change the appearance of my photos
while importing them, I could certainly do that--
for example, making all of the images appear as black and white.
But I'm going to leave that set to none so that the appearance of the photos is not changed.
I can also add additional metadata to my images as they're being imported.
You can see I've already specified a Tim Gray copyright metadata preset.
You can also create a new preset or edit an existing preset.
I'll go ahead and choose the new option from the pop-up.
That will bring up the new metadata preset dialog
where you can type a name for the preset and then add specific values
to metadata that you would like to have added to your images.
For example, I can add my copyright information.
I'll just put a copyright notice for myself here.
We'll set the copyright status to copyrighted,
and the copyright URL I'll simply make my own website.
I'll go ahead then and type a new name here.
We'll just call this Tim Gray new copyright since this is the latest update.
I'll click the Create button, and now we have that preset available.
Keep in mind, however, that when you're adding metadata to your images,
presumably you'll use a single preset for all of the photographs you ever capture.
So you'll want to make sure to only add specific values that will apply to everything,
such as your copyright status, your contact information, and details like that.
Another option for metadata is the ability to add keywords.
Here, again, we need to be careful.
We want to only add keywords that apply to every single image that we're importing.
For example, I have some images of a swan,
but I would not add swan as a keyword because only a few of these images
actually include a swan.
But all of the photographs in this case were captured in the town of Hallstatt, in Austria,
so I could certainly add Hallstatt as a keyword.
I could also add Austria and Europe as keywords.
So just be mindful that you want to make sure that the keywords you're adding
apply to every single image that you're currently importing.
It's not a bad idea to sort through the images
and make sure that the keywords apply equally to all of them.
In this case, I think I'll also add Alps as a keyword
because while the Alps aren't necessarily visible in every photo,
all of these photographs were captured in the Alps.
So that will take care of keywords.
I'll go ahead and press Enter or Return on the keyboard to apply that change.
Finally, we can take a look at the destination.
We had already specified that I was downloading my photos
to the pictures folder on my internal hard drive.
But I want all of these images to be organized into a subfolder,
so I'm going to turn on the Into Subfolder check box,
and then I'll type a name for this folder.
In this case, we'll just call this Austria.
And these images happen to have been captured in 2012,
so I'll type 2012 as well.
Note that I'm using the Into One Folder option to organize.
We could also specify by date, and then all of the images would be
organized based on the date they were captured.
But I prefer to have all of the images from a single trip organized into a single folder,
so I'll choose that Into One Folder option.
And that takes care of all the settings for importing my images.
Now, it might seem like there are a lot of options to choose from,
and that, of course, adds to the flexibility of the import function.
But most of these settings are actually sticky.
In other words, the next time I import images,
most of the settings will be exactly as they are right now.
So when I have new images on another digital media card
from the same trip, I'm not going to need to update very much.
In fact, I'll just need to change the start number for my file naming,
possibly the keywords, depending on where I've captured my next set of images,
and that's about it.
So while you might spend a little bit of time getting things configured just right
the first time you import images into Lightroom,
thereafter it's a very efficient process.
We simply make sure that the source is set correctly,
that we have the copy operation, assuming we're importing from our digital media cards,
and then just verify all of the settings on the right panel,
most of which will be exactly as we left them last time.
You can then click the Import button,
and Lightroom will import and process your images.
In this case it's making a backup copy for me automatically,
renaming the images, and adding keywords and metadata to them as well.
So, a lot is being done for me automatically, very quickly and easily.
[Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4]
