So I just thought I'd finish off session two with a catalog loose ends video. So look at some of the things we may have overlooked. So I'm hearing an empty catalog, which would be your experience when you first install and launch Lightroom. It's going to open a brand new catalog here with no images in it, and you think what am I going to do? So you're going to hit import, of course down in the bottom left hand corner. And if you've got your images all nicely organized in your pictures folder, then you can literally just go ahead and choose that folder and import the whole thing.

I mean, you could import your entire Pictures folder. And as you can see from here, Lightroom is going to take everything and fine so it's found 1800 photos, it's found 1800 photos, 56 gigabytes in total. And it's just going to preserve that entire folder structure. So you can see right here, it's going to take my Lightroom folder, it's going to take my other catalogs, it's going to basically take all the images that can find. Now conversely, if you've got administrative files like catalog files, and everything Your Pictures folder as well, you may just choose the travel photos folder. So you can see inside travel photos, I've got all my Bali, Cambodia, China and so forth.

If I was to import that travel photos folder Lightroom is going to import everything within Lightroom is going to import all the contained images. Lightroom is going to preserve the sub folder structure. And we're good to go. So it's not starting from scratch in Lightroom is not as intimidating prospect as it might seem. If you've got a folder with all your photos in it, or maybe it's an external hard drive, you can just import everything from there. And of course, you'll just add there's no need to copy it.

Just go ahead and add everything from there. So that's what's going on there. Now there's a if we were to go ahead and just let me just set up the settings here. So we'll say standard size previews will say don't build smart previews will say don't import suspected duplicates, and then we'll apply during import no develop settings will apply our metadata template Right there. Now let's say this is a standard import. This is how you always import.

So what you can actually do is you can save that as a preset, say down here import preset, I'm going to click down there. And I'm going to go save settings as new preset. And let's just call this default, we'll just call this our default, import, and create. So now that we've got an import preset created, what I can do is I can collapse the Import dialog box. So this big sort of triangle on the lower left hand corner looks like an eject button says show fewer options when you click on it. And I just clicked that and it's going to shrink my Import dialog box down to something much smaller.

So now I can basically I've got extra can still choose a different metadata template. I can still add keywords, and I can just simply choose my default input and now Lightroom is going to import with that standard process. So look, I'm not I'm not a fan of this, to be honest. I just thought I'd show you this because if you accidentally clicked that, you might think, Hey, where did my big Import dialog box go? So this has been in Lightroom, for a long time, this, this ability to compact the input dialog in an attempt to simplify it, because what Adobe get a lot of complaints about importing in Lightroom. People find it just too complicated and getting to all sorts of trouble.

So they've tried a number of things to simplify it, this is one of them. I'm not so sure this does simplify. To be honest, I find this a bit confusing. I am much happier in this big open interface where I can see everything. And I know exactly what I'm doing. But I think as I said, it might be useful to know if you've accidentally clicked that.

This is why you've compressed your input dialog down very small. So you can just expand it again from there. So I'm not sure there are too many other loose ends really, I think we probably have covered a lot of things you need to know about importing and catalog management. So I just thought I'd That that idea of importing an entire folder of sub folders and just reassure you that Lightroom certainly will preserve that folder structure and everything will be nicely maintained. As you've got it organized, you've got your little compact issue there. So that's a importing and catalog management section.

I think it's an area that I know a lot of people have a lot of trouble with. And as with all these videos, I more than welcome you to contact me if there's anything you think I've overlooked, or you'd like me to explain in a little bit more detail, and I'd be more than happy to do that. And if I get multiple requests for a particular topic, then I'm more than happy to make a new video covering all those topics and add that to the existing bundle. So you'll have all my contact details through your registration here. So hopefully, I'll hear from you and hopefully you're finding all of these videos useful. I Kayden.

Thank you