Lightroom Synchronize Folder Option

If you have a folder in Lightroom such as your Pictures folder, but you are not sure that all of the photos in that folder and its subfolders have been imported into Lightroom, you can have Lightroom check for you.

I revive this post every couple years because I think it is a very handy one for everyone to know, with many uses:

  • You haven’t been that organized and you want to make sure all your photos are in Lightroom
  • You regularly add, for example, iPhone photos or scanned photos to a folder and want to bring recent additions into Lightroom.
  • You have been shooting raw+JPEG, and have been importing only the raw files, but now want to import the JPEGs. (Read this Shooting in Raw+JPEG post and change your Preferences to treat them separately first).

Here’s how:

Right-click on the folder you want Lightroom to check (all subfolders of this folder will also be checked), and choose Synchronize Folder…Lightroom Synchronize Folder Option

The dialog that opens (after a delay while it checks the folder; shown below) will show you how many new photos it found, if any, and give you the option to import them. I recommend checking Show import dialog before importing, so that you can be sure that you really do want to import them.

 

synchronize-lightroom

 

This dialog also gives you the opportunity to have Lightroom look for missing photos (with question marks) in your catalog. I don’t recommend checking the box to remove them using this process — it is much better to go through them in the Library Module and decide if you want to remove them or find them.

Scan for metadata updates is independent of the new photos process. This looks for any changes to your files that other programs, like Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw, have made. You can check it if you work with other programs and want to see if your files are up to date.

Click on  Synchronize, and the Import dialog will open.

Note that the photo count in the initial Synchronize dialog does not take into account whether the photos may be duplicates of photos already in Lightroom. When you click “Synchronize” and the Import dialog opens, you may see this count decrease, if you have “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” checked in the top right panel in  the Import dialog. If you want to bring in the duplicates so you can clean them up from within Lightroom, uncheck this box.

In the Import dialog, uncheck any photos you don’t want to import, choose Add in the top center to add to the catalog without copying or moving, and then click Import in the bottom right.

[sc:signup]