Importing photos from a drive - Lightroom Tutorial

- [Instructor] You probably have a lot of photos on a hard drive. Importing photos from a hard drive that's connected to your computer is called the import-add method. I recommend using the import-add method for beginners, because nothing much can go wrong. Lightroom Classic doesn't touch your photos, it just learns about them. Importing teaches Lightroom Classic about the location of the photos, and it creates previews in the catalog so they can be viewed. When you use the add method, the photos stay exactly where they are on a local hard drive. So before we start the import process, I'm going to jump out to the finder to show you where my photos are. I have my photos on an external hard drive, which I've named external photos drive, and inside of that drive, I have a folder called T Jackson's photos, and then I have a folder for each year. This is how I like to organize my catalog of images. So far, I've imported the first four years, but the 2020 folder has not yet been imported. So we'll start with that. I'll open this folder so that you can see the contents. So I have four folders that are named by the date of the capture with a little description about them, and those are inside of the 2020 folder, and we'll import one of these to get started. So I'll switch back to Lightroom and we'll take a look at how that works. When you're in the library module, there's an import button in the lower left-hand corner here, or you can always go up to file, import photos and video. It does exactly the same thing. Now by default, Lightroom wants to find images in the pictures folder. I don't keep my photos in the pictures folder. You may, so this might work for you. But my photos are on an external hard drive, so we're going to start on the left side here where it says select a source, and I'll close up my startup drive, and then I'll open up my external photos drive. And this is where we see the folder with my photos. We see each of the years, and we'll come down here to 2020 and select the first folder in 2020. Now, I could select the whole 2020 folder and then check include subfolders up here, but I don't want to do that. And as we get further into this, it'll make sense why. Let's just import one folder at a time. So I'll select the dog beach folder, and then I'll come over here to the right-hand side and click import. But before I do that, I'm skipping the most important part. At the top right here, these are your different import methods, and we want to make sure that add is highlighted. Now, I don't have a thumb drive or a camera card plugged in right now, so I'm not seeing these other options. Add is already highlighted because Lightroom recognizes that these photos are on a mounted hard drive. But always double check and make sure that add is highlighted before you click import, because when you do that, your photos don't get touched. So we'll click import, and we see the progress in the upper left-hand corner. What's happening is Lightroom's learning about the photos and it's building previews of those photos. Now if we come down the list in the folder panel here, we'll see the years that had already been imported, and I'll collapse those so we can get to the bottom. And here's the folder for dog beach that I just imported. It's not sitting inside of the 2020 folder, because Lightroom Classic didn't automatically recognize that folder when I imported. But I can add that folder to the folders panel here if I do a right-click or ctrl + click right on the new folder dog beach, and come down here to show parent folder. Now the dog beach folder is nested inside of the 2020 folder just like it is out on the hard drive. So the previews are almost built for this. The import's almost completed. Let's review what just happened here, because understanding this is really key to understanding how Lightroom Classic works. Lightroom Classic learned about the folder and the location of it on my external drive with the photos in it. During the import process, the preview files were generated so that the photos can be viewed here in the catalog. The photos, though, have not been touched. So the import-add method only works with photos that are already on a local hard drive.