Import sends photo files to the wrong drive

[Austin Fox]

Cronic problem: I have a Windows drive dedicated to photography. My auto backup software expects to find all my photos on that drive.  Periodically, I find that imported files are being loaded to my Windows "C" drive instead of where they belong.  I then have to move them manually to the correct drive and re-establish the correct drive/path for the next import.  Today, I again find that the last few months of photography has been loaded onto my "C" drive.  Therefor, they have not been backed up.

Why is this happening? Why does Lightroom suddenly and without warning decide to load files onto the default drive? What can I do to stop it? This is the third or fourth time this has happened.

Windows 10 64 bit

Lightroom Classic 12.2.1

[dj_paige]

What is happening is that you have (accidentally?) set the wrong Import options. A strong possibility is that if your imports go to the C: drive, you have select COPY instead of ADD. There are other possibilities as well, such as selecting the wrong Destination Folder.

[Conrad C]

In the Import dialog box, what I do is set up the correct drive and folder path in the Destination panel, and any other import options that I always want to be the same, and then at the bottom of the Import dialog box, I create and name an import preset.

And then, every time I import, before I click the Import button I always first take a quick look at the currently selected import preset. If the current preset is the named preset I saved, then I know everything is correct and it will import the way I want. But if the current preset is something else such as “None”, or has the words “(Updated)” after it, then I know at least one setting is not the way I want it, so I choose the named preset to ensure that it will import perfectly.