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Danny of the North
Participating Frequently
October 15, 2025
Answered

Lightroom sometimes makes adding photos from my computer into an album unnecessarily difficult

  • October 15, 2025
  • 4 replies
  • 215 views

I have a photo that I want to add to an album in Lightroom (let's call that album X). The photo already exists somewhere else in my Lightroom collection. When I try to drag the photo's image file from my computer into "album X", Lightroom tells me that the photo is "Previously Added". This is true from the perspective of the photo and my Lightroom library as a whole, but it is also false in the sense that the photo does not already exist in the album that I just tried to drag it into.

 

Finding a copy of the photo that is already in my Lightroom collection is a massive task considering the size of my Lightroom collection (slightly more than 64,000 images). Since Lightroom OBVIOUSLY knows where the photo can be found in my collection, it should offer to add it to the aforementioned "album X" instead of expecting me to spend what could be quite a while finding where the photo already exists in my collection so that I can drag it into the "album X".

 

[Moved from Lightroom Classic forum to Lightroom ecosystem forum by moderator]

Correct answer JohanElzenga

I'm afraid that is how things are designed. Dragging a photo from outside Lightroom (like from the Desktop) into Lightroom is an import action, and that is why you get the error saying that the image has already been imported into Lightroom. It clearly is, because you said that the image is already in the Lightroom library. So yes, you'll have to find the image in Lightroom, not on the desktop (which is not the same file, because Lightroom stores its images in the cloud), and add it to albums from within Lightroom. As Lightroom can search on all kinds of things, including the file name, that should not be such a daunting task, not even with 64,000 images in Lightroom. 

 

4 replies

Danny of the North
Participating Frequently
October 23, 2025

Thanks to JohanElzenga for explaining why Lightroom CC behaves the way that it does.

Unfortunately, I don't find his suggested workaround to be particularly viable for a few reasons:

  • It turns a conceptually simple operation consisting of "add these images to the target catalog while doing the obvious thing with any of these images that happen to already be in the Lightroom CC library" that a computer is obviously able to perform correctly into an error-prone time-consuming task that the human must perform and which, once the human believes that they have performed the task manually, the human has no particuarly viable way of knowing if they performed the task correctly.
  • There does not seem to be a way to capture a list of rejected images. This is important because it would provide me with a checklist as I work through each rejected image.
  • Hunting down where each rejected image already resides in my library so that I can add the original of the rejected image into the album that I was copying the entire set of images into is a process that strikes me as quite error-prone and more than a little time-consuming if, as I suspect would often happen, dozens of images need this treatment. It is also the sort of task that computers excel at and which humans do not.
  • while I understand that I am asking that an operation that Lightroom CC treats as "import these images into the destination album" be treated as an operation along the lines of "import the images in this set that are new into the destination album and add the already-in-the-Lightroom-CC-library copies of the rest into the destination album", that understanding does not change the fact that a conceptually simple operation becomes quite unwieldly when put to practice.

@Aleke 

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
JohanElzengaCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
October 16, 2025

I'm afraid that is how things are designed. Dragging a photo from outside Lightroom (like from the Desktop) into Lightroom is an import action, and that is why you get the error saying that the image has already been imported into Lightroom. It clearly is, because you said that the image is already in the Lightroom library. So yes, you'll have to find the image in Lightroom, not on the desktop (which is not the same file, because Lightroom stores its images in the cloud), and add it to albums from within Lightroom. As Lightroom can search on all kinds of things, including the file name, that should not be such a daunting task, not even with 64,000 images in Lightroom. 

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
Danny of the North
Participating Frequently
October 16, 2025

It took some dancing but I've got my Lightroom issue into what I believe to be the correct forum.

@Aleke 

Community Manager
October 15, 2025

Hi @Danny of the North, welcome to the community!
Could you let us know what version of Lightroom you're using? Since you mentioned collections, I’m guessing it might be Lightroom Classic. If that’s the case, you can uncheck the “Don’t import suspected duplicates” setting in the Import window under the File Handling panel.
Hope that helps, but feel free to reach out if you have any other questions!
Alek

*(If you mention me with an @, like @Aleke, I’ll get a notification and can respond faster.)*
Danny of the North
Participating Frequently
October 15, 2025

This is intended for @Aleke

(I'll get the hang of this facility eventually)