Importing Past Years Photos

[kalfrigon]

Lightroom Version Number

6

Operating System

1. Windows 10

I am going to import a few years worth of photos. Because I already have these images on a hard drive I will be adding them to LR. I will have 10's of thousands of images....will I have issues importing as some of them will have the same name because of the camera restarting its count. I was going to put them all in the same cataloge. What is the best way to do this without causing issues? Thanks.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

That's absolutely fine kalfrigon, Lightroom will recognize that they're different photos because they're in different folders.

 

[Paul_DS256]

You may to consider this an opportunity to rename your files to something unique using the RENAME option on import. See How to specify import options in Lightroom Classic CC . Personally, regardless of folder, my files are name YYYYmmDD_hhMMss.*. The flexibility I find with this is that I can move photo's from one folder to another with little concern for conflict.

 

[clee01l]

The flexibility I find with this is that I can move photo's from one folder to another with little concern for conflict.

The requirement that no two files can have the same name in the same folder is just another example of the weakness inherent in organizing by folders.

 

[PhilBurton]

You may to consider this an opportunity to rename your files to something unique using the RENAME option on import. See How to specify import options in Lightroom Classic CC . Personally, regardless of folder, my files are name YYYYmmDD_hhMMss.*. The flexibility I find with this is that I can move photo's from one folder to another with little concern for conflict.

I also use this naming convention. I also add a seqn4 number to each file name, since my camera can shoot 9 frames a second, and LR can't deal with sub-seconds. However, the missing piece here is the folder organization. I use a YYYY/MM/DD folder organization.

Note that LR can assign files to date-based folders on import only. Once imported, you can use the F2 function to rename files within a folder, even using the same naming scheme.