In this tutorial, Joe Houghton demonstrates his step‑by‑step Lightroom import workflow using photos from a family beach outing at Skerries. He begins in the Library module, creates a dated folder hierarchy (2021 → 05 May 2021 → Skerries) to keep months alphabetically ordered, and selects the SD card as the source. He chooses a standard copy (not Copy as DNG) because his Fuji RAW files don’t convert well to DNG, while noting he does use DNG for Nikon RAW. He filters the card view to show the most recent shots (ZA sort) and uses shift‑click to select a range of images for import. On the right‑hand side he sets a renaming template that prepends the date (YYYY‑MM‑DD) and appends his name to the original camera filename. He applies a custom metadata preset that fills the IPTC Copyright and IPTC Creator fields with his website and name, ensuring ownership information is embedded in every file. He also adds universal keywords (island, Skerries, coast, beach) for the batch. After confirming the destination folder, he starts the import, watching the progress bar as Lightroom copies the files into the newly created folder structure. The video stops before the import finishes, focusing on the workflow rather than the final import time.
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Hi, this is Joe Houghton and welcome back to Lightroom Bites. Today we're going to have a look at my import workflow. I'm just going to show you how I import a few images that I took yesterday when we went on a family day out to the beach at Skerries. So start in the Library module and you want to be in the left-hand column And I have a folder called 2021. Now today is the 10th of May 2021, so I need to create a folder to put the images in from the 9th of May. So first thing I'm going to do is create myself my May folder because I don't have one at the moment. So I choose the 2021 folder, right-click, Create Folder Inside, and then 05 May 2021. 05 because that way, with the, with the 05 and 04, it keeps the months in alphabetical order. Then I click on 05 May and I right-click on it again, create a folder inside it, and that yesterday was the 9th of May 2021, and I'm just going to put Scaries. Create. Okay, so there we are, and I can just choose it, and you can see there's no files in it. So now I press on the import key, and we have the MacBook Pro hard drives. So now I'll press in the SD card, and we'll give it a second to see it. There it is, Untitled 1, and now we can see the images coming up. Now at the top here, I just want to copy rather than copy as DNG. I don't want it to convert them to DNG on the way in. I don't convert RAW files from the Fuji like that. I do actually convert my Nikon RAW files that way, but the Fuji ones, it doesn't seem to like the DNG conversion as much, so I don't. Now I only want to import the shots from yesterday, so I'm I only need to import a few of them, so I'm going to uncheck all, and that means that nothing is now selected for importing. And now I'm going to choose the— and as you can see at the moment, if down here at the bottom the sort is ZA, which brings up the most recent shots to the top when you're looking at your card, and by filename. So ZA and filename, and then the most recent shots are at the top. So that's one from yesterday, and if I scroll down the thumbnails to a little bit further down, let's see, these are all yesterday's as well. Yeah, it's building up the thumbnails. Let's just see what else we can find. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to let it go down to here, which is the place— that's my first shot from yesterday. So if I Shift and click now, it will select all the shots from that first one that I clicked on down to that one, and then I can just put a checkbox in the top left-hand corner, and now all those ones are selected for import. Now over on the right-hand side, I generally just have minimal previews because Lightroom is pretty good now at building previews on the fly. I always rename my files, so the template here, if we go and edit that template, I'll just show you my template. So I rename my files to the date, YYYY-MM-DD, and then the file name straight out of the camera. So there's the date, there's the file name, and then I put in my name on the end. Okay, and it just means that the file name now on my Mac when I'm copying files around and stuff, has got all that information already part of it. So I just click on Done there. The next bit is Apply During Import, and one of the things you should always apply is metadata. So if we go and have a look at the Joe Houghton 2021, if I edit those presets, and I'll show you that preset. So let's go up to the top here, and I'll go down to Joe Houghton 2021. You can see that I have various stuff in this preset, so you only need to put stuff in these 2 areas: IPTC Copyright and IPTC Creator. So I just put in this kind of information into those 2 areas, as much individual information as you want to identify yourself, but this is going to go into every single image, so houghtonphoto.com, there we are, every single image that's imported and it will become part of the image. So it asserts your ownership of these images. So we now click on, go up here and update that preset and then click on Done. Okay, so that preset is now updated. The other thing is that I'm going to put some keywords in. So these keywords are keywords that apply to all the images that are being imported. So island, scaries, coast, beach— that'll do. And then you make sure that it is selected, the right folder, as the destination folder. So you can see I can close 2021 down here and open it up again, and you'll see that I've got April and May, and there's the shots from April and from May. Make sure you've got this one as the destination folder and then hit the import. And now what you're going to see is that the copy and import photos process bar should start to fill up, and as it does and it writes the first image into that folder, you'll probably find that the left-hand column here navigates you down to that folder. There we are, Skerries, and you can see it now counting up the number of images that are being imported in. So I'm not going to wait for it to import all those images, I just wanted to show you that import workflow today.
