The SmugMug Blog

Importing images into Lightroom can be a chore. What is a benign process when you shoot a few hundred pictures in a portrait session can become unwieldy when you come home with 15 CF cards full of files from a big event.

First, consider that Lightroom has always imported from only one card at a time. The standard process is as follows:

1. Insert CF card .
2. Configure the Import options and hit “Import.”
3. Wander off with the intention of coming back when its done.
4. Forget you were importing for an hour and then realize it.
5. Wander back in and go back to step 1.

Repeat 10 or 15 times. And 8 hours later I’m good to go. A whole work day and I’ve not edited a single photo yet. Ouch.

This just does not work for me. I’m a ballet photographer and work routinely involves shooting several thousand photos of a single performance that need to be quickly imported because the next performance is 2 hours away and the cards need to be cleared and ready. That is some serious file management and little time to do it.

So what does the enterprising photographer do?

Photo Mechanic for Easier Photo Imports

Some years ago I bought Photo Mechanic solely because its Import tool was pretty darn good. Much better than Bridge. Of prime importance was the fact that it would import images from all mounted cards in order. If you had the card reader for the card, it would do the right thing. The rest of Photo Mechanic is inconsequential (and a bit ugly) with Lightroom, but this one feature makes worth the purchase price. I have 5 or 6 card readers, so I can really chew off a bunch of cards in one fell swoop using this little tool.

So for the past few years, I would use Photo Mechanic to import the files onto my Drobo and *then* run an Import in Lightroom to get them in and previews built. This was a two step process that had to be done serially as well: 1) import with Photo Mechanic 2) turn Lightroom loose on the big folder with everything.

Somewhere in the Lightroom 2 cycle I’d worked on a redesign of the Import dialog and as part of that I’d suggested the whole multiple cards thing as a way to speed our customer’s workflow. Sadly, we didn’t get it any of this for the release of version 2. So when Lightroom 3 was released, the first thing I looked at was the new Import dialog and if it could do what I needed. Unfortunately, no.

So recently, as I returned from another photo shoot with 12 cards in tow, I was all set up to dance the same waltz with the same klutzy partners.

But something clicked this time. Call it a Lightroom Epiphany of sorts, but all of a sudden I realized a possible solution had been sitting under my nose all this time.

Lightroom’s Auto Import Feature

Lightroom has this somewhat obscure feature called “Auto Import” that watches a folder and then imports any images therein.  As I recalled, it was mainly Lightroom’s way of dealing with tethered capture before we had a dedicated module for such. Anxiously, I clicked on the File Menu to see if it hadn’t been deprecated due to the new Tethered Capture features. Huzzah! It was still there.

Giddy, I clicked on the Auto Import Settings and set it up to watch the folder I was going to use Photo Mechanic to dump them to.

From Photo Mechanic to Lightroom to SmugMug

So, I setup Auto Import and chose the import directory. So far so good.

I then went into Photo Mechanic and dumped all 6 cards to the aforementioned directory.

It worked! Photo Mechanic dumped all the cards to the directory and Lightroom then imported it and built a preview for each image. It took awhile, but not nearly as long as I was used to. And it did it in one fell swoop.

So, so awesome.

I did notice that at one point there were over 500 processes going at once in Lightroom – one for each import and preview build it was working on. But it didn’t seem to bother it much.

The result is that I’m in business more quickly than before. I was able to import all those cards and have Lightroom ready to edit, with all files imported and previews already built.

It’s a beautiful thing.

Since that ah-ha! moment, I’ve dramatically cut down my file management time, which lets me get to the important parts faster. SmugMug makes uploading directly from Lightroom dead simple with their integrated publishing service, so I can get photos into my galleries and start making money.

- Wade

More on Streamlining Your Workflow

The Help doesn’t stop here. Check out these additional resources:

• Wade’s Lightroom Tuesday posts
• Dgrin Finishing School forum
• SmugMug Help Pages