- [Instructor] I'm going to teach you
how to import photos from your computer
using the exercise files.
You could follow along with me,
or you can import photos from your own collection.
If you are importing your own images,
you should by now have organized the photos and folders
on a drive that won't fill up anytime soon.
I have the exercise files on my external photos drive.
You probably put them on the desktop and that's okay,
only for the purpose of this course.
Before we get started, let's do a little review.
Remember that importing teaches Lightroom
about the location of the photos.
It doesn't actually place the photos into the catalog.
And now that we understand that we're ready
to start adding some photos to our catalog.
So I'll switch back to Lightroom and we're going to import
the chapter two lesson two folders.
To get into the import,
there's a few different ways we can do it.
In the lower left-hand corner is a big Import button,
or we can go up to the File menu and come down
to Import Photos and Video.
And also note the keyboard shortcut here
is Shift + Command + I if you're on a Mac,
or Shift + Control + I if you're on a Windows machine.
So I'll go ahead and select this
to enter the import dialogue window.
This is filling my entire screen.
If yours doesn't look like this,
you might be in the compact view.
Down here in the lower left-hand corner is this triangle.
I'll click on it,
and that'll take me down into the compact view.
I don't want to be in the compact view for this though,
because I want to see all the options.
So I'm going to click again on that triangle
to open it back up.
Now we're going to read this window from left to right.
On the left is where we choose the source or the location
of the photos that we want to add to our catalog.
All the hard drives that are mounted
to my computer are listed here.
Yours is going to look a little bit different
because your setup will be different than mine.
I know that the photos are on this external photos drive,
not the startup drive.
So I can click on this triangle to collapse that,
and then open the external photos drive,
and then open the exercise files folder,
and then open the chapter two folder,
and that's where we'll find the chapter two lesson two.
So I'll click on that to select it,
and then all the photos that are contained in that folder
will show up here in the center.
So let's move over to the center, starting at the top.
We see the word add is highlighted.
And that's very important because importing photos
that are already on the computer or hard drive
is called the add method.
The photos are added to the catalog.
Lightroom learns about their location,
but nothing happens to the photos themselves.
If you see one of these other ones is highlighted,
Lightroom's going to move or copy
your photos someplace else,
and you don't want that to happen.
So make sure that it says add.
And then in the center grid,
you should have all the photos selected.
You could de-select an image
if you didn't want to import it,
but I hardly ever do that.
So I'll just leave that like it is,
and we'll move over to the right-hand side,
where we have options about how we want to handle the file
and things we might want to do during the import.
For right now, we're going to leave this all
at the default setting and make sure this option,
Build Smart Previews is not checked.
Then we'll come down to the lower right-hand corner
and click Import, and these photos
start getting added to the catalog.
Notice there's some operations happening
in the upper left-hand corner of the screen,
and that's Lightroom building the previews
so that we can see what they look like.
Let's take a close look at this left panel over here.
Where it says Folders, we now see the external photos drive.
This shows that it's mounted to the computer
with this green button here.
And then we see the 02-02 folder that we imported.
And because this is open,
we can see that there's a folder
of the United States inside of that,
and then there's multiple folders inside of there.
This folder panel is a window to your computer.
So what is shown here is exactly the same
as what is on the hard drive.
Remember, there's a lot more photos
on the external photos drive,
but Lightroom only knows about the contents
of 02-02 because we imported it.
So that's the quick and easy way to import photos
to your Lightroom classic catalog
by adding photos that are already organized
on a local hard drive.
Before we import more photos,
we'll take a look at how we can add metadata information
when importing next.