I CANT IMPORT MY PHOTOS!!!

[Riley Walker]

I went to import about 160 photos into my LR catalog last night and it wouldn't work. The import window opened as normal, I selected where the photos would go and hit import, I checked back 5 minutes later and the progress bar hadn't changed, I then cancelled and tried again, but the import button was greyed out and I couldn't select it. I had to close and then open the program to try again... same issue! I closed the program again and tried, restarted my mac, optimised my catalog and still noting!
I made a new catalog and it worked first time, no worries, I tried to move the photos from this catalog to my original and it said 'unknown error'. I even tried exporting as tiff from this catalog and importing these files into my original catalog and had the same issue in the import window! Please help! I am using the latest version of Lightroom.

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

Someone may have a more specific suggestion if they have heard of this, but I would start by trying to minimize what you are importing and see if your main catalog will simply not import anything (e.g. 1 of those images, or some older image), or will not import the specific images or number of images.

Are you using Copy, Move or Add? As an experiment you might change that up.

If you are importing from a card as opposed to disk, make sure you can read the card (I assume you can as you said you put them in a new catalog). Consider trying to copy the images to disk first (manually) and then import, and see if it makes any difference?

I'm not suggesting that any of these should be necessary, just trying to change things around to see what works and what does not.

 

[Riley Walker]

Thanks for your reply Ferguson!
I actually tried all of those things and nothing worked, I got the files off of the SD card and saved them on my HD and everything! I did however format my card, take a photo and I managed to import it into my original catalog, does this mean my files are corrupted somehow perhaps?

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

That you managed to import them (the same exact ones?!) into a new catalog would seem to imply it is not the images, right? Or did I misunderstand.

This is an off the wall thought, but Adobe has a free DNG Converter. You might grab it from their download site, convert your raw (I assume raw?) images to DNG, and see if those import. Or more to the point see if they convert, as that would provide a somewhat separate (at least separate from your catalog, if not from Adobe) check that they can be processed.

I'm hoping someone else jumps in with an idea.

 

[bkleine]

I got a similar issue with LR4.4 and I can not resolve it. It helps to use one of the backups to import these images and save the backup over the old catalog.
The issue has nothing to do with the images, the folder where they are situated, whether you add the pictures from your harddisk or from a SD card. When using the SD card the images are even copied to the harddisk, but they are not added to the catalog. It is the error in the catalog which chokes on the import.
One would suppose someone form Adobe would like to look at these faulty catalogs. Would that hope be to much for a global player?