How to import into required folder (LR3.6)?
XEyedBear Feb 8, 2012 12:09 PMThe import action in LR 3.6 utterly confuses and frustrates me. I have spent the best part of 8 hours trying to import a single image into the logically correct, sensible and desirable place in my folders list. LR is bizarre to the point of being perverse in where it chooses to place the imported photo. Can somebody expain to me how to make it work correctly?
Within the 'My Pictures' folder on a hard disk I have a 'My LightRoom Photos' folder. It has a number of sub-folders, the most important of which is where I want to copy/add a particular image. The name of the sub-folder is irrelvant. I'll call it 'Digital'. The physical organisation on the harddisk within Digital is firstly by year number folder: 'yyyy'. Within each year folder there are subfolders for the month/day of the shot, with folder names of the form 'yyyymmdd'. This structure appears replicated in the folders pane on the left hand side of the LR Library module - just as I want. This is all standard stuff, right?
To make things easier to understand I have now moved the image I want to import to a different hard disk, into the 'Public Pictures folder'. It's there in Windows Explorer.
Now I Import this image by a number of different methods: I expect it to go into the folder <Digital><2010><20100615> (that's the date it was shot) to join other photos shot on that date. No matter what options I choose, the image is added to a newly created folder, named '20100615', within 'My Pictures' at the same level as the 'My LightRoom Photos' folder,' in the Folders panel in LR. But this folder does NOT exist on the hard disk and the imported image is, in fact, inside the physical folder I expect. It just doesn't show to be there in LR. This is highly confusing and totally counter-intuitive.
The options I have tried are:
- 'Copy' or 'Add'
- right click the 'Digital' folder in the Folders pane and select 'Import into this folder'
- ditto with the '<Digital><2010>' and '<Digital><2010><20100615>' folders
- selected the relevant folder in the Desination Folders pane on the right hand side of the Library module
- selected or deselected 'Into subfolder'
- selected or deselected 'Organise into 1 folder'
- selected or deselected 'Organise by date'
So why does LR choose this bizarre place to catalog the photo? Why dies it pretend there is a new folder on my hard disk and re-create it in the catalog, which I absolutely do not want and which does not actually exist?
The above is the simplified problem. The real problem - which I have abandoned working on, is where the new image already exists within the folder (on my hard disk), but does to appear in the LR catalog, in the folder into which I am trying to import it (Add) (in my catalog). This is the default position for any new image I wish to Add to the catalog when I edit a .NEF raw image and want to save (i.e export it) as a jpeg. That is, LR gets things quite wrong when I do what is intuitively obvious to me. This makes it very difficult to trust and use the product.