Suddenly I can't import photos into Lightroom!

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Claire

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I have a small photography business so I'm always importing, exporting, editing, and clearing digital files from Lightroom and my HD.
All of a sudden after tens of thousands of photos I've shuffled around I can't import anymore!

My HD has available space and nothing has changed since I dumped photos from the same camera to Lightroom a couple days ago. I'm so confused. HELP ME PLEASE!
It did, however, accept 16 files before it stalled.

Any troubleshooting ideas would be VERY appreciated.

Thanks for your time--
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Claire, welcome, sorry you're having trouble. I guess the first generic trouble shooting step is to create a new empty catalog, and see if importing works normally there. If so, you may have a problem with your working catalog. The catalog optimization function Edit > Catalog Settings > General > Optimize may be able to solve such a problem.

That'll get you started. We'll likely need more details, and I'll welcome input from our Mac-based members.
 
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Hi Claire, welcome to the forum!

It'd also be useful to know whether there's any error message when it doesn't import. And are you importing from the hard drive or from a memory card or camera?
 
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Hi all,

I'm having a very similar problem.

When I connect the my camera, Lightroom picks it up and opens the import dialog, which works correctly. I then click on import and all looks good - but instead of the progress bar moving along, it just sits for about 3' seconds and then stops. No error messages, no noises, nothing - it just stops.

If I create a new catalog, it works fine - but I'd rather not do this.

I've tried optimising my catalog but that didn't help.

I've restarted Lightroom a bunch of times and that doesn't help either.

[EDIT] I went to import the remaining photos into the new catalog so I could at least start working on them and hopefully consolidate later, but now the new catalog is busted too! I can't create a new catalog with every import... [/EDIT]

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks very much,

Victoria
 
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Welcome to Lightroom Forums!

Does it happen any differently if you read from a card reader instead of from the camera? Or if you copy the files to your hard drive using the Finder, then import from disk instead of from the camera?
 
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Hi Mark,

Thanks for the reply and welcome!

I don't have a card reader, so can't test that. If I drop the files onto my hard drive I can copy them in from there - which is great, but not ideal...

I'm going to test with my point-and-shoot tomorrow (need an early night for an early start) to see if it's definitely lightroom or if - gulp - the camera's misbehaving...

- Victoria
 
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Victoria your profile shows you are using LR3 Beta, this does have known issues with importing and I wouldn't recommend using it for real work, just for testing. LR2.6 is the latest version.
 
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Victoria, welcome to the forum!

To add to Nik's comment (and I'd agree completely with that comment!), some of the known bugs in import are it stalling when it finds a video file, certain tiffs, and if you're renaming with certain characters too, as well as issues with some cameras. It's a pretty early beta build only really fit for playing and testing, rather than real work.

FWIW, I'd highly recommend splashing out on a card reader - you'd save yourself some headaches and wear and tear on the camera too.
 
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