Lessons

Lesson Info

Importing Photos into Lightroom

Let's go into importing images, so I'm going to take this card and I'm gonna put it into my computer, and you'll notice that when I put it into the computer, it doesn't open light room, but it does put itself on my desktop. I'm gonna open up this card and inside of this card, you will see that I've got a siri's of photographs. Those photographs are what I want to bring into light room, but rather than letting light room move it somewhere, I don't know where they are. I'm going to go and put them where I think they should go, and there are two places that you could put them the first places to put them in your pictures folder and that's, where most people put their photographs because it says pictures on it makes sense, I'm going to warn you against that doesn't mean it doesn't work, you could do it that way. You're just not as well protected against some kind of a theft or loss or something of that nature. My greatest suggestion would be to purchase a secondary hard drive, something th...

at works by plugging it into the computer you can see this is a hard drive, it's just a little tiny hard drive doesn't matter what kind of hard drive you get this one is ah, usb three so usb three is faster than us be too, so it works a little faster so you're not the wait is long but I would use a usb three drive or maybe a thunderball drive usb two is a little slow firewire is good but the fastest drive you khun get is better because it's going to speed light room alone but if you can get yourself a secondary drive that way even the light room itself the catalog remember our card catalogue is on this computer the photo's just like the library stacks in the library where all the book it's our the books are in the stacks over here. That way we have our information about the photos here. The photos themselves could be protected if for some reason this laptop got stolen or lost or damaged and usually the laptop is the thing that gets corrupted and killed, not the hard drive itself then you have a protected version, something you know that you can put in a safe or you can put it in a safety deposit box or you can hide it under a pillow or something like that where it's not going to get taken stolen or damaged that's a better place for it so just consider that as an option I will show you where you would put them if you wanted to use just your computer that would be inside of your hard drive you would go to your pictures folder inside of your light room folder and right next to that you could then make another folders so just go down and say I want to make a new folders so right click new folder once I've got a new folder, I would say photos so now your catalogue is here this is the card catalogue and all your photos they're going to end up going right here that's where you would do it if you wanted them to be on this computer if instead you wanted them to be I'm going to delete that if instead you wanted them to be on another hard drive so that you had them separated putting your eggs in different baskets then you would go over to your photos drive so I've created dr called photos and you can see that I have a bunch of jobs or moments or trips so this one is a china trip that I took and you can see inside the top china trip I have my photos and I will show you those photos if you go right here um here we go here's some photos were going to the photos uh seen there's some photos right there, you see that there's just a bunch of photos and just kind of scan through, so I've got photos from china and then I went to london and this is a place these a set of photos in london but the key is that you can see they're separated out by when I took them and what they're of now if you're doing this for personal use, then those folders might be something like this um everything fromthe spring of two thousand fourteen and then everything from the summer of two thousand fourteen so if you're a slow shooter and you shoot a point and shoot and you only take you know a hundred photos a month and you don't actually download those photos till the car gets full you might be three or four months before you download those great so you're going to make a folder every time you download a card if on the other hand you're pretty avid shooter then you're going to want to import photos every time you get back from shooting so maybe you shoot once a week well then you'll have a folder every single week of that shoot I went out to the desert this week and I shot I went to disneyland and I took some photographs I went to cancun and I took some photographs every time I get back when I download those photos, I'm going to go into this folder inside of this folder inside of the photos dr and I'm going to right click and create a new folder that new folder is going to be named very specifically and I'm gonna name a reverse date two thousand fifteen oh four that's our month april and then we're going to say today I think today might be the thirty first maybe today's mae I don't remember, but whatever their isn't april, april thirty first april thirtieth I was just inventing a day sometimes I get an extra day in a month, I just asked for it, they give it to me so I'm going to hit an underscore or a dash you could do a space if you want that sometimes computers don't like spaces in file names, so I'm going to do an underscore and then I'm going to say platt, because I'm the client now see, I do things based on clients you might not do anything based on clients you might actually since it's personal if it's a personal job or something like that, what you might say is, uh, chandler, which is where the images were shot and then you do another underscore and then you'd say kid photos, something like that to identify if you were going to london, then you might say london and then underscore and then you might say business trip or something like that so it's really up to you how unit label these but the important thing is that you put this reverse date the reverse day allows all of these folders to stay in order of the date they were shot the first one being at the top the last one being at the bottom that way if you go to it um outside of light room you can still see the organization so we're going to quickly put this as platt because I'm the client and then I'm gonna say jackson because those were the photos are of jackson so inside of that folder zoom out so you can see I've got a folder one more folder to my pile of boulders and I'm going to grab this folder right here and I'm going to drag it into here now if you drag it without touching any buttons you will get a little arrow you can see that arrow I know it's hard to see but I can't zoom in right now because I'm actually it just is impossible for me to zoom in right now but there's a little arrow there and that arrow says I'm not copying it I'm just making in alias or I'm making a ref prince to it you don't want to do that what you want to do is hold down your option or your altar key and if you grab it and drag it you get a plus symbol if you get that little plus symbol and you let go it will start copying the contents of that card into this folder now the other option? If you can't figure out how to do that, maybe you're using a pc and it's a different, you know, windows system in it, and it won't do the little plus symbol. You can always double click this, and if you grab a folder inside here and usually your photos are going to be inside of a folder called dcm, or something similar to that, the miscellaneous folders not have any photos and it's going to have other random stuff from the from the like system stuff from the camera, you don't need that, so I'm gonna take this and drag it in, or I could open it up and find the photo that has all the fold of photos in it, and I could highlight all of those and dragged those in regardless of how you do it, whether you do it with one click method that I'm trying to do, or if you dig down and grab the photos and drag him in either ways, find the key is that you get these photos into this folder and let them copy in. So we're gonna let these copy and shouldn't take us very long, but once they're copied in, then we're going to go toe light room and light room still is not going to have seen our photos, it has to actually look at them now. Whereas before if you've opened like her before and you tried it by letting light room import it when you stuck in the card light room open and said, hey, do you want me and forties and you said yes so it seemed like it was a fast, easy way to go and if you know what you're doing and you know where that pathway is great because you light room khun do what what I just did for you but most people and I mean most people when they use that option they don't know where it's putting their files and so I want you know where those files are going that's why I'm teaching you this way at the a little bit further I'll mention an import dialog box and I'll show you what that looks like so I can show you where to do it if you want to do it but I really hazard against it, okay? We're almost done importing our files and so we're going to close down these folder I'll leave this one open because we want to see where things are, but we'll just set that right there and as soon as this is done, we're going to go backto light room there we go backto light room see how there are no photos in here there is an import button on the bottom left hand side of the library module now let me introduce you to the lot modules so that you know what we're looking at the library module is right up here everything's up here in the top left hand corner you can see library develop maps, books slideshow print and webb the library module is where you organize things the developed module is where you adjust things and then you can look att locations from your map you can if you have a gps phone or if you have images from your your iphone that you're bringing in those images will all be geo tagged on the map so you can find things based on where they are on a map so that's pretty cool option books is where you would make books and print tum slide shows you can show people slide shows you can export movies of slide shows the print module is where you khun like literally set up printing methods to send it out to printers and then the web's where you could design little websites for yourself or for your clients. We're mostly concerned today with library and the develop module we're going to show you how to organize your images we're going to show you how to develop your images meaning we'd just them and then we're going to show you how to share them and export them that's what we're concerned with today okay, so we're gonna go down to in the library module to the import area we're gonna click on import and it's going to give us a dialog box and you can see that it wants to do what I just told you wanted to do and that is it goes up here to the u s digital card is trying to import from that card I told you I didn't want to do that but I'm going to show you just in case you want to go crazy and do this I'm going to show you how it works but then but those of you want to do it the way I am teaching you to do it close your eyes, plug your ears for about three minutes and then come back or just fast forward er or weight or or listen and disregard what I say okay, so those of you want to try it out you can certainly do it you're going to see that the os digital card is here and what you're going to do is it's going to copy notice that there's only one option up here because it has to copy the information because it's on another card it's going to copy the information so this is the location where the photos are it's on the left hand side and then on the top is a little pathway so that arrow that pathway tells you this is is going through this process and it's going to copy it you can either copy the original file or you can click on copy is a d n g and it's going to copy it and make it into a digital negative a digital negative is just another rock kind of file that takes all raw images and turns them into one universal raw image and if you want to learn more about deon geez, I talked more about him and some of my later classes here on creative life so I'm going to copy knows and then if you go over to the right hand side this panel is what it's going to do with those files if we go up here to the top you can see that you have options you can tell it what hard drive you want to put it in you khun tell it whether you want one for one previews or minimal previews if you use minimal previews it's going to make them really fast bringing in really fast and you'll be able to look at him really fast but when you try and zoom in has to build a big preview so you can see if it's sharp if you build one for one previews it will take longer for to build those one for one previews. However, when you zoom in, they will be instantly showing you whether or not your image is sharp, whether someone's smiling all that kind of stuff ok there is also something below that called build smart previews smart previews are little tiny raw images that help youto work on files even when you've unplugged the drive. So if I were to put the photos on this drive with catalog is over here and I unplugged this drive I could still work on the photos even though these were not present and so I would highly suggest that you always leave build smart previews on and that will allow you to do a lot of work even though you're not you're not attached to your drive which again makes you more secure remember I talked about thing the idea that here is the card catalogue and if you could work on this and put this under a pillow or put it in a safety deposit box or make sort of safe in a fire safe or something like that then your photos would always be safe even though this might be stolen or broken and taken or you know you could spill your wine on it or whatever. Okay, so although there was a movie back in the eighties that this guy spilled some wine on his computer and it turned into a supercomputer because of it and then it could like control his house and it stole his girlfriend and all sorts of stuff so anyway don't spill wine on your computer because it might end up stealing your spouse I think I think that was the message anyway. So over here, you also see you. No other options. Like, for instance, make a second duplicate that's for copying an extra copy. Be over somewhere so you could do that on dh. Then there are other options, but they're not quite as important. Now, when you look down here, you can rename the files. We don't want to rename the files. We'll just leave them as they are. You can also establish keywords. So if these air all portrait's, you could type in the keyword portrait on dh, then you separate them by commas. And you, seif portrait child. So that's, what a keyword is it tells us what the photos of so you could put those keywords in if you want to be ableto find things like, for instance, this is my italy trip. So put italy and then below that. And this is where most people mess up and that's. Why this? This option is so dangerous and that's the destination. Most people just let it go wherever light room wants to put it and that's where they fall into trouble. So what we really want to do is we want to put it into one folder not by date, but in one folder. So most of the time it starts here and then it started putting these were dates all over the place, so what we want to do is put it in tow one folder and we're going to tell it a sub folders, so we want to put a sub folder inside of one folder, and then we would name that folder and this is where we would put in that date two thousand fifteen oh four thirty underscore platt underscore jackson so that's where we would put in that name if we wanted to do it this way and then we would tell it it's going to be in this sub folder, it's going to be in one specific a folder and that folder is not going to be in the macintosh hard drive it's going to be in our photos drive and then we could just tell it we want to put it all into this drive right here or we want to put it into you could create a folder in here called photos, and then you would just choose if this was your say, if this was the folder you wanted to put it into, you would say, you're going to choose the this folder and then it's going to start making sub folders inside that folder, so then every time you came in tow light room he would simply rename this folder and then keep it going to this this folder here and it would just constantly be adding more and more and more into that folder okay but this is where everybody gets all messed up so I am going to tell you again that if you don't know what this is all doing if you think this is complicated it's going to screw you up you're gonna get messed up and so I'm going to say cancel out of this make sure that when you import your photos you do it by hand you take these images and you put it in the folder that you've created that way you know where they are you're not relying on your five year old daughter put them somewhere for you then once you have them in the location that you want them to be take this and eject it right click and eject your disk take your discount set it aside now when you go into the light room and you click on the import dialog box it doesn't try and grab those images off of your card it says to you hey where what photos you're looking to import what do you want me to do with them up on the top here and where and what do you want me to do with them and where do you want me to put them and how do you want me to treat them so what we're going to do now is go over to the right hand side. We know that we put them in the photos folder in the full photos drive, which is here, and we know that we went over teo here's jackson right there, we know that we put him in here, so I'm gonna click on this and when I do so, I see all the images just like I would have in the card, but now they're actually where they're supposed to be. I put them there, and now I'm telling light room look at them. This is where you're gonna look at him, then I'm going to tell it up here how I want them's treat those photos don't need to copy, um, because they're already there. So this is the key ad you're just gonna add those photos toe like room. So, really, what you've done is you've told the little old library lady, you said, hey, I just put a bunch of books in this folder on this shelf, please go card, catalog those and so the little old lady is going to go over to the catalog shelf and she's going to look at them and she's going to stick a dewey decimal system on each one of them and she's going to type up a little card with her little typewriter and each card's going to type up what it is and a little description of the book and then she's gonna wheel it over and put it in the card catalog and that's what's gonna happen here, but you have just instructed light room to go look at the shelf, see what's on the shelf, add it to the card catalogue, and when it adds it to the card catalog, you want to put a description just like the description the card catalog. You want to put a little description on it? So you're going to say jackson because that's, his name, you're going to say child because that's who it is that's what it is, and you're going to say portrait and now you have keyword it you on ly keyword things that air in every photo. So if it's an italy trip, you can put italy, but you can't put, you know, the the coliseum in there because it's not on every photo, just put italy travel something like that if it's a card that spans over three months don't keyword anything because you know I mean you don't know what's in each one of them, you can cure them later and for maura about key wording, you can also tune into one of my later classes again, we're just kind of covering the basis is the bakes basics here? Okay, so otherwise up here you have again you khun build the one for one previews you can build the smart previews on dh, then we just want to see him and don't don't import suspected duplicates helps to avoid just in case you copied photos that you already copied into here it's going to say, oh, I already have that image, so I'm not important again so that you have two images of the same image, so we're going to build the smart previous don't import the selected duplicates were going to put don't worry about these developed settings. The metadata area here is for you to add copyright things like that, but you khun seymour about that in aa in a later class and then we're going to hit import when we import it is now going in looking at the book, seeing what's in the book, writing all the information about the book and putting it into the card catalogue this is now the card catalog and if I want to then take once this import is happened and you can see the progress right up here. Once that important actually happened, and it has built the smart previews. Then I could literally unplug this drive, get rid of the drive, and I could still work on the photos. The only time I would need the drive is when I wanted to export the photos and send them somewhere, like to print that's, or if I wanted to print him to my printer that's, the only time I really need the photos. Other than that, working on the photos, playing with the photos that khun b all done, even without the photos present. But you can always leave them attached to that's. Fine.