P: don't re-import deleted photos with "New photos"

I don't know that you'd need "many" more memory cards, but you might well need at least one more. It depends on the frequency that you upload and the frequency of your backups.

When I am back home and have backed up to a second disk, I move the cards from the "needs backup" stack to the bottom of the "available" stack.

I like this as it sounds like something that's quite easy to implement.

Relying on capture date does have its weaknesses, though. It won't work very well when you're importing from different cameras whose date/time settings are not in sync, although I can imagine that this could be solved. It also won't work if you change the camera time when you move to a different time zone for example.

Having said that, it would definitely work for me 🙂

Hi folks,

Thanks for thinking about the problem constructively and suggesting possible solutions/workarounds.

One thing I forgot to mention is that I am not always able to make a backup, especially when I'm abroad with just my laptop. In that case the card doesn't hold the third copy, it has the second copy. If my laptop's hard disk would fail, at least I still have the copies on my card. Did I ever encounter a problem with the disk I store my images on? Yes, it happened to me once and I can tell you I was happy that I still had my photos on a memory card. This is why I would never delete photos right after importing them.

Mark, your suggestion is indeed something I could do while I am able to make backups. It's not that different from what I do now and it solves the import problem for the cases where I can make backups not too long after the import. However, with just the laptop this would leave me with just one copy of most of my photos, or at least I would require many more memory cards to "survive" a long period with just my laptop, is that correct?

Victoria, that's an interesting suggestion! Just tried out your suggestion and it works nicely. It's a bit more work than pressing Ctrl-backspace 🙂 to get rid of the rejects but at least the imports are less of a hassle. It seems to be a reasonable trade-off. Thanks for the tip.

Frank

I agree with this request. The problem is that when I choose to import New Photos, Lightroom finds ALL photos that it knows nothing about. One way to solve this is to add another option "Newer than the most recent one Lightroom knows about" (better name required 🙂 ).

With this new idea, if you import picture 1, 2, and 3, then delete #2, then try to import picture 4 from the original card, it would only import 4 because it's newer than #3.

> LR knows I deleted the images, so show them in a different way (or not marked them as new).

That's the problem - once you've deleted them within LR, you've told LR to forget that they ever existed.

May I suggest a tweak to the workflow which may do the trick, at least until Adobe comes round to your way of thinking?

I can understand you not wanting to just reject them and keep them on the hard drive, as that'll take up hard drive space. But what if you marked them as rejected, dragged all of the rejected ones to a 'delete me' folder once you've finished culling, and then switch to Explorer/Finder to delete the photos out of that folder.

The references would remain in the catalog in that 'delete me' folder until you choose to wipe the card and remove those references, but the fact that LR still has those records would solve the import problem.

What is wrong with removing photos from the card after they are imported?

LR does not "know" you've deleted the images if you remove them from LR.

I agree with the original post. It's annoying to me too. Not so much when doing full day shoot or vacations. But if you take a few pictures everyday, it's a pain.
LR knows I deleted the images, so show them in a different way (or not marked them as new).

luc

A simple workaround is to continue what you're doing, but don't put the card back in the camera -- each time you import, put the least-recently-used card into the camera and reformat. You'll be reformatting a little more often than you do today, but if you have enough cards you can still ensure that you're not reformatting until you've got a proper backup. (This is what I do.)

To make this slightly more complete, you might develop a system to ensure that you've got a backup before you format a card. It's hard for me to suggest anything without understanding your workflow and backup system.

Two Ideas:

1. A tertiary backup option upon import.

2. Prompt user to delete all photos, or just those imported, from card after thorough import & backup validation.

Note: I've lost photos by deleting them from card without having imported them, but I've never lost photos due to deleting them from card after successful import/backup.

The obvious question is "How many times have you gone back to a card to retrieve an otherwise irretrievable image?"

Taking advantage of Lightroom's ability to make a second copy of a file on import should eliminate this need to use your cards as your failsafe.