Video - Synchronizing Your Folders
If you’ve imported photos into Lightroom’s folders then everything is good right? But what happens when you want to import more photos into the same folder down the road. For example, this past week I created a folder called “Great Smokies Day 1″ and imported the photos from day 1 of my workshop into Lightroom. Then we went out and shot more photos later that day. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I was able to import those photos. The cool thing is that I didn’t have to go through Lightroom’s whole import process again. There’s a feature that allows you to add files into Lightroom that have been added to a folder on your hard drive but haven’t actually been imported into Lightroom yet. So sit back and watch the video to see how.





Get your weekly video dose of the coolest Adobe® Lightroom tutorials, tips, timesaving shortcuts, photographic inspiration, and undocumented tricks with Matt Kloskowski, one of "The Photoshop Guys" from 

on May 1st, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I always use this feature. Although I’m not really organizing everything into separate folders I find this feature really useful. I, for example, just have 3 folders, and lightroom only sees one of them, the RAW folder. When I import my photos I save them in a folder called RAW and then when I tell lightroom to process them they are saved in a folder called Processed.
I wish that Lightroom would do this synchornization automatically and for me not to have to go manually and do that. I understand that there are people who would hate such feature so Adobe should make it an option.
-LM
on May 1st, 2008 at 4:04 pm
This is a super cool feature. I’ve been using it awhile, but it’s good of you to bring it up because I think a lot of people miss this.
It makes it really easy to keep catalogs fro projects like you showed here, personal images etc. I’m using separate catalogs now for things like session, misc projects, personal images etc. The sync feature helps keep it all orgainized.
Gav
on May 1st, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Matt,
When you import photos in this manner, do you lose the backup function or does the sync folders recognize that you also created a backup when you imported the initial photos and create a backup as well??
Emmet
on May 2nd, 2008 at 9:21 am
Emmet, Matt turned off the import dialogue in the video instruction, but I believe if you left this option on, you would have the ability to set the backup options (but I haven’t tested/confirmed that).
on May 2nd, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Well I’ll start this again… Neither IE7 or firefox recognize the m4v format and I assume itune will open it but so far it doesn’t like the secure format.. Can you just make it a mpg and be done with it?
Jeff
on May 2nd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Can anyone help me? I am trying to transfer my lightroom presets to another computer and I don’t know where to find that folder on my mac, can anyone let me know where to look?
Casey Figlewicz
on May 2nd, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Casey, just go into Develop and right click your presets and press show in finder. Thats where you presets are and you can copy them as you like
on May 3rd, 2008 at 1:21 am
Question: Why when you synchronise a folder - do the shots were already existing then show up in the library pane under previous import ‘Missing Files’?
As an example - if you have 180 files in a folder - then save a file from this folder you have been working on in photoshop under a different name - you now have 181 files in the folder. Synchronise the folder and it will of course find the extra file - but it then shows up 180 missing files as above - even though they are not missing! Weird….
Lightroom does this every time and I have no idea why or how to get rid of it. Very annoying. You can even see it briefly in Matts Video.
on May 3rd, 2008 at 9:20 pm
great video, and good tip. I have this problem though. I have a jpg file that is no bigger the the raw picture, but lightroom keeps telling me that the picture is to big for import.
on May 5th, 2008 at 4:55 am
Great video!!! Do you or anyone else know what happened to the User defined sort order that used to be in Lightroom. I can’t find it in the beta 2 version. How do people change the order? I would be so happy if someone could answer this.
freddi
on May 6th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Yeah, my computer is not recognizing this video format either. Will all future videos be in this format? Say it ain’t so!
Karen