I love to just sling a camera around my neck and go for a walk whenever I need a little exercise and some time to think. I have a list of “categories” of things to shoot that I always like to add to my library, such as skies, background patterns, neighborhood animals, street candids, and multiple people riding on a single personal vehicle such as a bike or 4-wheel motorcycle. My “normal” routine, when I download my camera cards to Lightroom, is to download them to a dated folder that carries either the name of the shoot or the main location of most of the shots. But for the “odd and ends,” I find it much handier to put each of these categories straight into their own folder, especially if I’ve just come home from one of those “walks”.

When you are in the Library Module and you click the Import button, you get the following dialog:

The only one of these buttons that I ever have any luck with is the Choose Files button. The rest, no matter what card I’ve installed into my computer’s card reader, inevitably produce a No Photos Were Found to Import dialog. So I click Choose files. Then I see this dialog:

I click the first file name to select it, press Cmnd/Ctrl + A to Select All, and click the Choose Selected dialog. This is the next dialog that appears:

The very first thing I do is click the Show Photos button, which opens the panel on the right side of the dialog and shows scrollable thumbnails for all the chosen files. In the upper left corner of each thumbnail, there’s a small white box and underneath the thumbnails panel are buttons that say Check All and Uncheck All. I uncheck all and then check all those scattered shots that belong in a pre-determined category.

Next, I make sure the File Handling menu says “Copy Files to a New Location and Import and then click the Choose button. I get another dialog that lets me browse for the folder location I want to use. If I’ve already created a folder for the category, I simply select it. If it’s a new category, I select the Master Folder for all the files I want in this Library, the click the Make New Folder button. A New Folder appears and I double-click its New Folder name and type in the name of the folder as I want it. I don’t put my usual YYMMDD precursor to the folder name because I know that these photos are going to have been shot on a variety of dates. The lack of a date also tells me that this is a categorical collection made over time. When I’m done, I just click the OK button:

Now I drag the Size slider for the thumbnails until I’m basically seeing one shot at a time, because then I can usually tell if I want to keep or reject it. When I want to keep a slide that’s going into the folder category I just made or chose, I click the little white box to check it.

In the File Naming dialog, I choose Custom Name - Original File Number. Then I add the name of the category as the file name. Then, if I encounter the file later, on it’s own, I automatically know what collection I’ve been putting it in. I also have one more way to find it when I’m using the Text Attributes to put together a collection in this category and may want to include other shots that just have those words as keywords.

Next, I choose any Information to Apply for all those images that I’ve checked that will go into this category.

Finally, I click the Import button and watch for the thumbnails to appear in the Preview panel and for the Import “thermometer” to roll across the top.

When all the photos for the most recent category have been imported, I double check the keywords for each photo to make sure there’s nothing I want to change or add. I then click the Auto Tone button in the Quick Develop panel if there are any shots that are obviously over- or under-exposed.

If there are other photos that belong in other categories or folders on this same card, I repeat the whole process above, checking only those thumbnails I want to import into other categories. You can’t however, important the same image into two different categories. That’s one reason you should be sure to add any keywords that are appropriate to the whole group as you make each import.

Just continue repeating the above routine until you’ve made a catergory for each collection you want to make.

Name one folder miscellaneous snaps to put all the oddballs in until they start to make their own category.