Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

Chapter 5. IMPORT PHOTOS INTO LIGHTROOM

To work with your photos in Lightroom you must first import them. Beyond simply adding photos to the Lightroom catalog, there are many other batch processing options available during an import, such as copying and renaming files, converting file formats, embedding metadata and applying Develop adjustments.

In addition to showing how to efficiently import photos, this chapter describes best practices for designing folder and file systems and establishing naming conventions—both critical aspects of managing your photo library.

Lightroom Data Architecture

Image files must be imported into Lightroom before you can work with them.

Prior to importing photos into Lightroom, you should establish a system for organizing and naming your files. Setting up a well-organized digital storage system for your photographs will make your work easier and give you peace of mind. With a solid information architecture in place, you can accelerate your import process dramatically.

First, let's take a look at how the Lightroom program works with its database and your image files on disk (see Figure 5-1). Then I'll present some techniques for organizing your files and folders.

Figure 5.1. Lightroom data architecture

LIGHTROOM CATALOGS

Importing image files adds them to the Lightroom catalog: a database that stores information about the files and the adjustments you've made to ...