[MUSIC] Prior to importing your images into the Lightroom catalogue, it's wise to make some decisions about where you're going to store your digital photographs on your hard disk. And how you're going to organize and name the directories in which they are stored. You should also think about how and where you will store and name edited versions of your photographs that you create in Lightroom. The most common practice is to store all photographs on the same drive or same set of drives in a single folder. Within that folder, there will be subfolders organized in some way. One common form is to organize the subfolders by year or by half year and so forth. It's also necessary to think about the name of the subdirectories. Numerical names and dates are hard to associate with content. More commonly, photographers use a combination of both. I use year and half year for the top level directories, and within the subdirectories, name the directories starting with the date followed by a brief verbal description. For example, 10-12-2016, North Michigan Beach, Downtown Detroit. How you organize the directories and subdirectories should help you remember and find your images without tortuously long searches, item by item. If you compile thousands of images, searching through them one by one, no matter if they have numerical names or descriptive names, can be slow, tedious, and frustrating. Using a few simple, consistent naming conventions can save you hours and hours of tedium and frustration. Lightroom's search functions and collections and key words can also help. But their usefulness is much stronger when reinforced by meaningful organization of directories and files. Similar things hold true for file naming. Some photographers keep only one high quality copy. Some keep the original RAW file and make a non-compressed copy. Others add a DNG, digital negative, copy and a JPEG copy. Having four versions of a same shot starts to take up space rapidly, especially if some of them are RAW files or uncompressed formats like TIFF. The other side is that smaller files like JPEG, due to being a compressed format, lose lots of important data if copied. Usually photographers decide on a preferred high quality format and make variance as needed from that copy. This eliminates the need of having multiple copies of every file. In the same vein, many photographers preserve the original file name given by the camera and use metadata for encoding keywords and give verbally descriptive names only in the expert process. All of these areas are based on your preferences. But also play an important role in how you work with your photographs and require that you make decisions about how you want to organize, store, and name your work. When you first open Lightroom, there's nothing in it. There will be a message in the work area saying click to import files. Before Lightroom can do anything with photographs, they either have to be imported from a source like a camera or memory stick. It will then be placed somewhere on your hard disk and registered with the Lightroom database, or imported into Lightroom from whatever location they already occupied on your hard disk. In this case, they're physically there but still need to be registered in the Lightroom database. Once they're imported, they'll show up in the left panel around the workspace. And the currently selected collection directory of photograph will show up in the workspace. The images will have previews created that allow the display to be made more quickly, and it will allow for the library grid view to show you everything that is in that particular directory. And it will also have links to important information about the photograph, some taken from metadata created by the camera, date of photograph, kind of lens, f stop, and so forth. And some created by Lightroom, copy number, right record of modifications and so forth. All of this will be stored in the few files that make up the Lightroom catalogue and its associated database. To import files and videos, you go to the File menu in Lightroom and scroll down to the import files and videos, select the option. It will then open the import options in the top panel, and you will see the three areas of choice. The first is called select a source. Clicking on the right arrow will show all the choice of sources for photographs to import that Lightroom recognizes. Note, if your camera, or card reader, or memory stick, or external drive is not connected to the computer, Lightroom will not show it as a source. In the middle, we see the modes that can be used for importing the images into Lightroom. The first is copy as DNG, digital negative. This copies the file from your camera to a new location and converts it to a DNG. The second option is simply copy, it copies photos to a new location and adds them to a catalog. Copy leaves the original file where it was and adds a new one. The next option, move, copies the photos to a new location and adds them to the catalog. It does not leave the original file where it was. And finally add, adds the photos to the catalogue without moving or copying them at all. The right arrow on the right side allows you to specify the destination for the imported photographs. Clicking on the arrow should show all the destinations Lightroom recognizes, directories on your hard disk. The only case in which this doesn't happen is when you choose the add option, which does not allow you to specify any directory since it's only dealing with putting things in the catalogue and not with copying or moving files. Once these options are chosen, the Import button in the right-hand corner should illuminate. And clicking on it will begin the process of importing the photographs. The process can be stopped at any time by pressing the Cancel button to the left of Import. The left panel will show the directory structure of all hard disks and storage devices on your computer. And the right panel will display various options in two categories, File Handling and Apply During Import. For the time being, the default categories will be adequate. The bottom panel of the Filmstrip will be empty. [SOUND]
