Lightroom Bites 008 - Adding a folder of images to Lightroom

Hi, this is Joe Houghton and welcome to Lightroom Bites. In today's Lightroom Bite, I just want to show you how to add a folder of images that perhaps you've added into either Windows Explorer or Finder on a Mac and then kind of add that into Lightroom. In a nice easy way. Okay, so I've just done a WeTransfer and I've been asked to judge the Edinburgh Photographic Society kind of members annual exhibition, so they've WeTransferred that file to me and I've just opened up the zip file and as you can see here I have a 2021 Talks and Judging to process for folder. So I just expanded the WeTransfer file and put it into a folder that I called 2021-05 Edinburgh PS Members Exhibition PDI Judging. Okay, and there's, there's some subfolders under that with the images in, and then there's an Excel spreadsheet and stuff there. Okay, now if I just show you on the left-hand side here, this is my Lightroom catalog. And as you can see here, and if I, if I just open the catalog up a little bit further, let me just move Finder out of the way. And a little trick here, Alt or Option allows you to— if you hold the Alt and Option key, you can make the left-hand panel wider. Okay, so there's a little bonus tip for you for today. So you can see now, and if I bring Finder back in onto the screen so that you can compare what's in Finder with what's in Lightroom at the moment. So we've got 2021 Talks and Judging Process here, but I haven't got the 2021-05 Edinburgh PS Members folder under this folder. You see, I've got Midlands PC RPS Lightroom Live, Berry Mono, yeah, and an old Dorchester one that's gone. Okay, but it doesn't know about this new Edinburgh PS Members Exhibition folder because I imported that into Finder using WeTransfer, but at the moment Lightroom doesn't know that I've done that yet, so we have to tell Lightroom that there is a new folder in the Talks and Judging to process, and it's very easy to do that. So now I've got that new folder in, all I do in Lightroom is I click on the folder, I right-click on it, and then you synchronize folder. So I do that, and now it's seeing that there is new stuff in the subfolders underneath that. 233 new photos. I've got quite a bit of judging to do there by the look of it. If there's photos, if there's missing photos from the catalog, it'll also remove those. So I just say synchronize now. Okay, I don't show the import dialog before importing because all I'm going to do is just, just add this stuff to Lightroom's catalog. Okay, so synchronize. So what that will do now up at the top here you'll see that it's starting that synchronizing folder process, and as it does that, it will create that folder in Lightroom, or it'll add the folder to Lightroom in a second once it starts importing those files. Okay, so this takes a little while, and you'll see the import files at their current location start to happen, and then what we'll see down here under the 2021 Talks and Judgings process. There we are, Edinburgh members is coming in, and there's 5 imported so far of those 233, and they will just import in time. Okay, so there we can see it's now 25, so that we'll just let that run. 75 in, and once that has finished, up here, then the process is complete and Lightroom knows about all those images and you'll be able to go in and see those images, no problem. Okay, so as you can see, 175 done, 227 done, there we are, all finished, and once that disappears the job is done. So I can now click on this and all the files And the subfolders are in there, and I can go in and start to look at the, the images. Okay, that's it for today.