How to Import Images in Lightroom

Video Transcript

"BRANDON SARKIS: My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to be showing you how to use Adobe's Lightroom software. Now, we're going to go over our importing. So over here on the left hand side of the screen, we have our Import and Export buttons. We're going to click on "Import." It's going to pop open an actual OS dialog box which is kinda unique. It actually has the folder you want. Typically, you'd see it pop open a dialog box. It remains in program but this actually goes to the core OS and opens up a dialog box, at least in the OS 10 version. I think the Windows version does as well. So if you had a camera attached to it, you'd also see it over here in the devices column. So let's go the folder here I've got and you can scroll through, and you can see here on--these are actual real folders that are on my computer. These are all DNGs, digital negatives. There's just some more DNGs over here, and let's see, obviously, you can import drive for the library, or your Aperture library. You can do the digital images. So we'll select this image, and you'll see it opens up a new set of "Import" options, which we're waiting on, just takes a second. There we go. The first part is the "File Handling." You can either import the photos at their current location, you can copy them to new location and import, or you can move them to new location and import. The thing about this is if you move into a new location and import, it'll actually relocate your master files. If you copy them, it'll duplicate it. And if you import at their current location, it won't move them. But it will just import an image file for it. You can also copy photos as a DNG and import, which is kinda nice if you want to make your entire library of photos, all DNGs if you have mixed up like .tiff's, .pst's and .jpeg's. You can organize them by date. You can organize them by name. You can organize by import time. And you can have a "Not Re-import Suspected Duplicates" which is kinda nice. It will look through the filenames and the metadata will determine whether or not it's a duplicate. You can tell it where to backup too, which is kinda neat. You can go through the filename templates. Down here, these are developer's settings. You can import them as developed photos, if you want to import a whole roll of black and whites. If you want it you just go to here and click on that. It's going to bring them in a black and white mode. And on your metadata, you can also edit that as you bring it in. Same thing is you can also go through and edit your keywords, which is pretty nice. You can go through here, you can either "Select All" or see as you want, and you'd normally hit "import." Hit cancel if somebody already imported that photo. So that's it for your "Import" dialog. It's pretty--it's got some handy features in it."