Faster way to import just a few specific photos?

[brianc39072748]

I often take hundreds of photos at an event, and then later only want to import 5-10 (I burst a lot). Lightroom seems desinged to import an entire card, and makes it very difficult if I just want to import a few.

As far as I can tell, this is the fastest way to import a few specific photos on a card that has hundreds...

1. Star the photos in-camera.

2. Open Adobe Bridge*, filter just the starred images, drag them onto my desktop

3. Open Lightroom, navigate to the photos on my desktop, and import them.

* I use Bridge to find my starred images because, as far as I can tell, Lightroom cannot see in-camera star ratings until after the photos are imported. Frustrating.

Another method might be to make selects in Lightroom. But I find culling through images is much much faster in-camera. Lightroom forces me to wait several minutes for all the images to load before I can find the 5-10 I actually want.

Any suggestion on a fater way to just import a few images from a card that has hundreds? Thanks!

[Jao vdL]

There is not really an easy way that is faster indeed. What you can do to speed this up considerably is to import all images using the previews from the raw files (the embedded previews option) and not generate 1:1 or smart previews. This makes the import almost instantaneous and allows you to immediately start browsing and selecting. This is how I do this for a similar workflow with 100's to 1000's images at a time. I use XDR cards and a super fast direct card reader that goes over 500 Mbyte/s puling in images (the limit on the cards basically) so it imports over 10 raw images per second that immediately populate in Lightroom Classic. 100 images would take 10 seconds.

[KR Seals]

I shoot in a similar manner, music shows, air shows, wildlife, etc. I will also come back with hundreds or even thousands of images. My solution is to use Photo Mechanic to preview and pick the images I want to keep and import into Lightroom Classic. Photo Mechanic is extremely fast in Ingesting (importing) images from the memory card. Once the images start copying to the folder you designate, you can immediately start viewing images and marking the ones you want to take into Lightroom Classic. All the images I do not want to import into LrC, I delete from the disk (I have backed up the whole shoot first). 

It is a waste of time to go through and pick the ones you want to delete, just pick the ones you want to import and delete the rest..

One nice feature of Photo Mechanic is it's ability to Ingest images simultaneously from any and all card readers you have connected to your computer. There are a lot of good videos about Photo Mechanic on YouTube.

[elie_dinur]

I use FastRawViewer to review the card and find the keepers. As well as its speed its advantages are a real Raw histogram and both numerical and graphic over/under exposure indicators (the histogram in LRC, ACR and most other converters are not Raw histograms), the ability to show two, three or four images on-screen simultaneusly for comparisons, and the ability to pass images to a variety of converters. I copy them to disc and then import to LRC using the Add function.

[Jill_C]

I find it tricky to cull images in camera. The screen is too small to accurately determine whether focus is good, and it's too easy to accidentally  delete the wrong one. So I import all of them and them rapidly step through them on a large screen, hitting X for rejects and P for picks/selects. The Rejected ones are then moved to the Outtakes folder, and only deleted once I have finished editing the Keepers from the shoot.

[Conrad C]

1. Star the photos in-camera.

2. Open Adobe Bridge*, filter just the starred images, drag them onto my desktop

3. Open Lightroom, navigate to the photos on my desktop, and import them.

By @brianc39072748

You can streamline steps 2 and 3. There is no need for the intermediate step of dragging the images to the desktop. You can simply drag them from Bridge, and drop them on the Lightroom Classic application window or icon. When images are dropped on Lightroom Classic, the Import dialog pops up automatically.

When the Import dialog box pops up:

• If the images are still on the camera card, click the Copy option and select the folder where you want to store the images permanently. (If the image files are loose on the desktop, click the Move option and select the destination folder.)
• If the images are already in the folder where you want to store them on your Mac, click the Add option to catalog them where they already are.  

If you’ve set up an Import preset in advance that already includes your preferred import settings including the final storage folder, this entire process can be reduced to two quick steps: Drop the images on Lightroom Classic, and when the Import dialog box comes up, if the right Import preset is already selected just confirm by pressing the Enter or Return key (same as clicking the Import button).