Today’s Question: When I initiate an import in Lightroom Classic for a parent folder that contains a very large number of images in several subfolders, sometimes it takes a while before all the images in the source location are found, with an animated circle at the bottom left showing that it is still working. Do I need to wait until all photos are found before clicking the Import button, or will Lightroom Classic thoroughly check the full source and import all photos? I do have the “Include Subfolders” checkbox turned on.
Tim’s Quick Answer: All images in the selected source location will be imported, even if you don’t allow Lightroom Classic to count all the images in that source location before initiating the import.
More Detail: Interestingly, this is a question I tested with AI based on some of the discussion in my answers last week, and with both ChatGPT and Google Gemini, I was given the wrong answer. Both of those indicated that only the number of images that had been counted at the time you clicked the Import button would actually be imported.
Fortunately, Lightroom Classic is smarter than AI seems to think it is. When you select a source of images in the Import dialog that contains a particularly large number of photos, it might take a while for all those photos to get indexed. During the time that the images are being tabulated you’ll see a circular animation near the bottom-left of the Import dialog. To the left of that animation the current count of images and the total storage they consume will be shown as well.
Eventually all images in the source location will be indexed, at which point the animation will disappear and the count of images will stop increasing. This provides an indication of the total number of images to be imported.
However, you don’t actually have to wait for that indexing to be complete before clicking the Import button to initiate the process of adding the photos to your catalog. So, as long as you’ve configured all settings for import to your liking, you can click the Import button as soon as you’re ready, without waiting for all images to be indexed.
The only reason to wait for all images to be indexed first is if you want to make decisions about which images to import, such as to turn off the checkboxes for images you don’t want to import, or to take advantage of the Assisted Culling feature as part of the import workflow.
