Preventing auto import from importing duplicates

[gswarbrick]

...or another clever workaround.

I thought I'd finally cracked the wireless workflow from my Nikon cameras. I have a new portable wireless router which has a USB port on it which can act as an FTP server. The cameras send the JPGs to the FTP server and I can see them on my tablet - the same USB drive is a share on the network - and edit them 'live' away from my desk. All good.

What I want to be able to, though, is get back to my desk and have them sitting in Lightroom ready to work on. I tried pointing Auto Import at the USB share, but that's verboten because you can't Auto Import from a network drive because... Adobe. So I set up Dropit to watch the network drive - which it was quite happy to do - and copy any JPGs that appear to a local Auto Import folder and Lightroom happily finds them and imports them. And then Dropit scans the folder again, notices that the there are JPGs there that aren't in the Auto Import folder (because it's now empty) and copies them across again. Now, Lightroom's legendary ability to ignore duplicates should stop them being imported again but... it doesn't. And there doesn't appear to be any way to make it. So the files just keep being renamed, moved into the Lightroom folder and reimported.

I thought I had a solution - moving them from the FTP folder to the Auto Import folder rather than copying them and then sharing the Lightroom folder on the network so that I can edit it directly on the laptop's drive. Sadly, I can't make the tablet see that folder. The only other solution I can think of is to have LR ignore the duplicates - but if there's a way to do that, I can't find it!

Guy

[gswarbrick · Accepted solution]

Fixed it! Just needed a bit of lateral thinking. LR won't read from a network drive on Auto Import, because... Adobe. But it will write to one, because... well, Adobe.

• JPG gets taken on camera and FTP'd to the USB drive on the router.
• Dropit on the PC monitors the FTP folder and moves the JPGs to a folder on the PC
• LR monitors the folder on the PC and Auto Imports and it to... a different folder on the USB
• The tablet happily sees the USB folder on the network

Happy days! Now to try it at a major sporting event tomorrow!

Guy