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I am archiving a lot of my Fathers old CD's into Lightroom CC and often he has included the same photo in different albums (eg a wedding photo in each of the family albums). Lightroom says 'already imported' - I get that - but is there a way for it to still add to that album without having to tediously note each image and then find and add them manually. It seems to only add the new ones, but not reference the already imported ones, which seems counter-intuitive.
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In the review for import window the images already in the library should be grayed out.
It’s probably easier to go to the grid - All Photos - after import (assuming photos are in date order) and then select the items to add to the new album. Or create the new album and right-click to set it as the target album. You can then select random photos from the grid and press the T key to add.
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THanks for the suggestion, but I think I havent explained the problem carefully enough. My father carefully generated multiple albums of not only his photos, but scan and copies of our family archive. As an example an old wedding photo (scanned on a random date in the last 20 years from an original from maybe 1920) will appear in albums for each of at the attendees. Once I have added that photo once (say one of a 100 shots when importing album 'Brother'), it gets ignored when I import a similar album called 'sister'. Compound that by multiple family events, and multiple family members, with random dates on the scans or picture dates, and its all very unmangeable. The files are small (most of them under a Meg, so space is not a problem), and so I just want it either to ignore the duplicates, or add a 'virtual copy' or at least a reference to them in the new album.
To make it worse, I have tried copying and renaming the files with a suffix or prefix, and in the cc import review it sees them as 'new' with a checkmark to import - but when I import it tells me they are duplicates and fails to import.
Clearly some very smart anti-duplication at work, but unless there is enough intelligence to allow a virtual reference I would rather have an option to ignore.
Any help gratefully recieved, the manual process is taking weeks to go though and check each of them into the correct album - and is also prone to error.
Many thanks
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The only other suggestion is to use Lightroom Classic 9.2 but you would need to change your plan if you only have Lightroom 3.2.
Lightroom Classic does give the option to ignore duplicates on import. You can also add the import batch to a collection (similar to an album) and the contents of a collection can be sync’d to the cloud as smart previews.