When importing files from your card reader and/or camera, you’re prompted with the import dialog:

Although you might be eager to click the “Import” button as quickly as possible to add your photos to Lightroom’s library and start the editing process, having a little bit of patience here can save you some time in the long run.

Ken Milburn’s article “Building Your Lightroom Preset Library” touches upon how you can easily save the steps taken in developing a photo so that the same adjustments—whether it be adjusting the white balance, creating a sepia effect, or countless other possibilities—can be re–created later. These presets can also be applied to your shots while importing, thereby lumping the heavy–lifting into one step so that you can avoid having to interrupt your workflow with the same tedious steps.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I’ve created a Develop Preset named “FFWD – Blocks” (this preset is for a project I’m currently working on, and converts the incoming image to black & white, amps up the contrast, and slightly tweaks the tone curve). By selecting “New…” from the Metadata dropdown, I also created a Metadata Preset with the same name to apply common metadata to all of the images that will be imported. The details are displayed below:

Specifying as much metadata and development information before importing the photos allows you to provide it once and have it applied to all of the photos that are being imported to your library. The benefit is even more pronounced for those of us who happen to be running Lightroom on older hardware; although it might take a little bit longer to add the photos to the library, the time saved by avoiding having to root through your library and apply changes to each individual file is enormous.

Clicking the “Import” button will now add the photos to the library, apply all common metadata, and start them on their way down the development chute. The laundry isn’t totally taken care of (keywords and a few other pieces of metadata still need to be applied to each file and, of course, individual adjustments need to be made to each file) but Lightroom’s heavy–lifting can save you from having to do the whole cycle by hand.

Should you ever need to go back and update the common metadata that has already been applied, your preset is available from within the Metadata panel in the Library module (the same is true with the Develop Presets in the Develop module):

Now you have one less excuse to not keyword & categorize your images.