Fuzzy previews from camera to select to import on Mac Air

@Barb Wallace16E5  Hi Barb, I wonder if you are waiting for the jpg to fully load from the camera when you are viewing in the Import preview screen. The reason I ask this is that the speed of loading the preview from the camera is going to be much, much slower than loading a preview from a drive in the computer.

Given your comment about shooting many whale photos, I strongly recommend that you give Photo Mechanic a try. The procedure there would be to have Photo Mechanic "Ingest" (same as importing) your images to a drive in your computer. Then, in Photo Mechanic, scroll through the images (which is EXTREMELY fast) to tag the ones you want to keep. At that time, you can immediately delete the untagged photos which will accomplish your goal of not filling up the drive with photos you will not want to keep.

1. In your older computer, in the Windows computer, how were you viewing the photos before import?

2. On your MAC have you set it up to run LrC in low resolution mode?

I assume that in the import screen the thubnail previews are too small for your liking. 

Bottom right, well near to, slider to adjust that

It's not a good idea to work with the images on the camera. Use Lightroom/Lightroom Classic to import them to the folder/drive of your choice. The alternatie procedure is to copy all the images from the camera/memory card directly to the folder of your choice on the computer. If you do that, you would then import into Lightroom/Lightroom Classic from that folder.

Unless you have thousands of images to review for import, just go ahead and import them into Lightroom or Lightroom Classic. Do your review and rejection process in the Librar/Loupe View. In the Loupe View, it's possible to zoom into the image to see how the details look to help you decide whether to save it or not.

If you happen to actually have thousands of images to review and import, then look at Photo Mechanic for a very fast way to review and reject/delete images before import.