Import "Done" Button

[dwterry]

Two questions and a gripe:
1) What is the purpose of the "Done" button on the Import dialog?
2) Has it always existed or is it a new addition?

After getting everything set to import (keywords added, etc), I keep accidentally clicking the "Done" button, which might as well be "Cancel" because the effect is that absolutely nothing happens (except wasting my time because now I have to start completely over and this time watch for the "Import" button).

I swear it hasn't always been this way.  Am I right?  Is the "Done" button a new addition? Because I've been using Lightroom since v1.0 was released and I don't ever remember having this problem, only recently have I started accidentally hitting the "Done" button. That's what makes me think it is new.  And if it truly is as useless as it seems ... why not get rid of it?  There is already a "Cancel" button, we don't need two buttons that both effectively cancel the import process.

[Conrad_C]

It's all very well saying to retrain muscle memory but that is not the answer as it is the brain that will often say - "Oh it's the left hand button that I've used sometimes before"
We tend to work/read left to right so the order

By @howardsony2

When you talk about muscle memory, one important thing to keep in mind is the big picture: How have we done this in the past, and how is it done elsewhere?

As I pointed out in an earlier reply, if we go by muscle memory then Import should be last, absolutely. Because all previous versions of the Import dialog box in Lightroom had Cancel and then Import. When the Done button was added, it was at the left, which was perfect because then the positions of Cancel and Import did not change. As long as anyone continued to click the last button to execute the Import, nothing changed when the Done button was added. If you wanted to proceed with Import, you could still click that last button out of habit and it would do what you expect, even if you did not read the buttons. Because Import is still the last button.

If you look at how it is done elsewhere, you notice one thing: In most cases, especially on macOS, the button to execute the command and exit the dialog box is the last button (OK, Open, Save, Print, Export…). If you do not want to screw up that well-established muscle memory, then Import should still be the last button.

However, that example shows that even Adobe is not consistent within its own software when it comes to the order of the other buttons (Cancel and Done/Apply). And I did not even show other examples where Adobe put the execute button to the left (look at Save for Web in Photoshop). But mostly, they do what’s shown there.

(Microsoft Windows does it multiple ways that don’t match up well here…horizontally arrange buttons with Cancel at the end, vertically stacked buttons with Save at the top and Cancel underneath…)

EXPORT ( yes , in caps or bold please) Done, Cancel

By @howardsony2

It isn’t standard to format button text as all caps or bold. In both Windows and macOS, the long-established standard is that the default button (which executes the command and has Enter/Return as the keyboard shortcut) should be emphasized graphically, often with a solid background or thicker button outline. For some reason Adobe has drifted away from that standard except when the dialog box uses more standard components, such as the Lightroom Classic Export dialog box where you can easily tell which button is going to do the big thing when you press Enter.

[BlueRajasmyk]

The order of the buttons isn't the issue. The issue is that the "Done" button closes the dialog and causes you to lose possibly an hour of work. An "Apply" button would be fine, since it does not do either of these things.

[richardplondon]

I think most people's understanding of "Done" would include, that you would exit the current activity and that next time you returned, this would be a fresh activity. The only hour of work that I can imagine losing, might be if you had gone through checking / unchecking a lot of images towards a selective import, but then not gone ahead with that. AFAICT the only way to 'Apply' such a selection in such a way that you could return to the job later, would have been to modify the external files themselves in some way. That would involve its own practical problems. By definition since these are not yet imported, the Catalog is neither tracking nor virtually labelling those import candidates in any persistent way. Their checkmarks are just happening on-the-fly.

OTOH changing whether importing should be Add or Copy, or which metadata preset to use - those are a matter of the dialog itself and operate regardless of what particular import candidates may be seen this time or next time. And LrC can and does keep (Import / Done), or else discard (Cancel), a record of those changed dialog settings.

[Chris Goldthorpe]

I also think that adding the Done button to the import dialog was a poor decision.  It's not at all obvious what it means and it is too easy to press it by mistake. I've also made the mistake of pressing it not realizing that it doesn't mean what I think it means, which is that I'm done with selecting which photos to import. I even formatted my card once thinking that the import had completed and then had to recover my photos from the card. This may be consistent with other Adobe Tools but it is certainly not an industry standard. On1 uses a Done button pretty much like an OK button and I'm sure that there are plenty of other examples where Done means OK. 

As others have said this button should be given a better name and there should be a confirmation dialog to prevent the user from inadvertently cancelling the import.