LR 3.3 doesn't allow "Add" for images on memory card?

Question

Hi there,
so far I've been using LR 3.2 and as part of my workflow I simply used "Add" for import to index the files on my memory card, inspected them and move unwanted files to trash, etc. before moving the remainder over to my NAS storage for further work. Now in LR 3.3 I can only select "Copy as DNG" and "Copy" as possible operations on my memory card, no "Move", no "Add".
What's up with that? Any way to fix that or do I really need to downgrade to 3.2 to be able to work again?
Any help would be really appreciated.

Answer 1

First of all: Thanks for all your suggestions how I might change my workflow to make it more secure and work with LR even in the future. It's really appreciated. However, and I know I'm repeating myself here, I deliberately bought LR specifically because one of 3 or 4 options that supported my established and perfectly working workflow; if I didn't care I would be using Aperture now since it is not only cheaper but has some quite clever features even LR doesn't have. BTW: If I didn't care about the UI I would be using Bibble which also supports my workflow but is inferior in usage and processing quality IMHO. LR 3.2 has broken my workflow in a very subtle but nasty way and there's just no way I will change my workflow just to keep continue using LR. I want to be absolutely independent of any vendor -- working with catalogs/libraries/databases is okay as long as it's only for temporary memorization of changes.
degger, I can understand your desire to do a review of the images before having to copy them anywhere, be it a temporary or final location. It could certainly save some time if there are a lot of images that simply don't need to ever make it off the card. Where I get a little confused is that you don't seem to be wanting to do it to save time. You cite bandwidth and storage concerns, and working off a laptop.
I'm not sure how extra steps and copies would save me any time. Really, it doesn't get any faster than this:
1) Index/Render preview of all images on card
2) Inspect those images and remove coasters (note that inspection might require zooming, comparing images for the best shots, applying some temporary modifications like rotation/crop/exposure correction to check whether the RAW base is good enough for later use)
3) Move the remainder of the images (RAW+JPEG) to their final destination and clear the card
4) "Add" the images from their final location into LR again and apply the real modifications, exporting the results back to the final location
Simple, minimizes burden on "final destination", minimizes local disc space use and is safe enough for my use.
As I said before: memory cards can and will(!) break at any point of their use, during shooting, during the creation of on-site backups, when pulling them on their laptop, etc. pp. The extra risk of my workflow is so close to zero that I really don't care whether a card fails or not. I'd rather use many smaller cards than one big one so I don't lose all of my photos at once and I empty them as often as I can rather than having them sit around forever. Also if you ever hit the delete button on your camera that at least as unsafe as deleting them locally.
What I do care about is that "final destination" is safe and I mean that in every possible sense of the word.
I didn't see you mention the quantities of images or data you're coming home with, so I'll take what I think is a pretty safe over-the-top estimate of two full 64gb cards per shoot. You say it's a major concern for you, working on a laptop, that you don't have enough local storage to act as a buffer for the images before you delete unwanted images. I guess I'm confused as to how you wouldn't have 128gb of space to act as temporary storage, even on a laptop. I know you say explicitly in one post that you don't, I just don't see how. A $100 drive upgrade doesn't strike me as a major roadblock in a complex storage strategy for someone with networked RAIDs and offsite backup. I could understand if this were a backlog issue, and you weren't sorting through images right away and there wouldn't be enough room for multiple shoots to sit in temporary storage. But that's clearly not the case since your workflow currently deals with the images before they're even off the cards. Spending a bit of money to get a larger drive might not be ideal, and it would require a bit of a change to your workflow but it seems like an awfully easy solution to this problem.
Right now I have 340,7 MB space on my harddrive free. That'll be like 10 GB once I cleared all that garbage I had to create to deal with this very LR issue. Every changed the harddrive on MacBook Pro? I don't think so; it's a royal PITA and requires a lot more effort than just walking into a store and buying a new harddrive.
I'm using brand 8GB cards BTW, many of them. I don't trust bigger cards because if they break I'll lose many more pictures. I usually carry more than 1 camera with me and I normally don't fill up the cards completely because it still is a hobby not a profession and I don't intend to turn it into one either.
I also don't follow the use of the trash as a safety net. I know it's not part of your workflow, just something that saves your hide from time to time, but it is very much working against the current. Just like I said previously, if you leave your cards untouched during this whole injest/sort/archive process, no matter what you do or happens to your local copies you will have the original copies on the card until you stick it back in the camera and hit format. Deleting a file (moving it to the trash) during the review/import process is introducing needless complexity, whereas just leaving the card alone offers some innate data security.
Really what happens when moving a file to the trashcan is a rewrite of the FAT table to have the files point to the new position inside a special directory name .Trash or something. I agree each write is dangerous to the safety of the card but it's not like we're talking about intensive writes or non-atomic operations here; the data itself remains untouched but it's directory entry is moved out of the way. As far as I recall I never had to recover any images from the trash but it makes me feel a little safer should I ever select the wrong image before hitting "Delete Photos...". And no, it doesn't introduce any complexity at all. Extra complexity is when LR has to import and render full size previews of images that are known to be rubbish and expect extra slowdown when keeping LR open for a long amount of time and doing many operations; my approach starts always with a fresh catalog and I can easily process my images in small batches to keep memory requirements down.
Before using LR I had to use a different programm just to preview the JPEG images and delete the RAW+JPEG pairs manually which was more of a PITA so I was glad to figure out that LR 2 had the capability to actually deals with the photos on card.
I actually don't see a problem with how your managing your file structure. It's nearly identical to how I do mine, but unlike you I have never run into an issue where I need to split up an event/session into multiple folders. Even with multi-camera shoots, a single event directory should be able to (for a Nikon camera, at least) hold at least [N * 9999] photos, where N is the number of bodies. How many cards you use during an event shouldn't factor into folder structure at all, unless you do it on purpose. Making another assumption here, but 10,000 photos in a single even is pretty unusual. If I have my camera configured correctly, even if I used 100 512mb cards for an event, as long as I stay below 10,000 shots per camera body, they can all go into the same folder without any naming conflicts.
Great, I don't see any problem either. Also all my cameras have different naming schemes so the names don't clash.
I would think moving the files to the NAS is equally as free, with comparable speeds over gigE. The offsite backup is the only part of this equation that could really become more costly as data levels increase. But, even el cheapo cloud backup services and bottom tier home broadband plans offer unlimited data storage and bandwidth; there's no unit variable cost even if you were to backup an entire shoot and decide a week later to trash every single shot. I know there are situations where those kinds of variable costs do come into play, but even with relatively expensive Amazon S3, the cost of transferring and storing 25% bad shots from even a large shoot isn't what I would consider cost prohibitive for a photographer doing that much shooting with an already expensive storage solution.
Okay, let me explain. My "bad" shot ratio is more like 80% rather than 25% due to the (sometimes) excessive amount of bursts to catch certain happenings or expressions. "Bad" shots consists of duplicates, shaken shots, undesired motion blur, bad expression/closed eyes, bad framing, bad exposure other bad settings or just my own trigger slowness, etc. pp. .   I have several levels of backup, ranging from online on-site unversioned to online on-site versioned to a second RAID over online off-site versioned to an encrypted hosted storage facility to off-line versioned and encrypted to external harddrives I keep at several locations. The versioned backups, especially of-site are a real problem here, the versioning is happening on a hourly basis so any change within on hour will be recorded and kept for at least half a year including long-deleted files. I do have limited upstream bandwitdh and I pay for both local and offsite storage capacity and for excess upstream traffic to my server.
Again. Photography is a hobby and I already invest quite a lot in it but there have to be boundaries.
For the import process it seems like you're using now, and looking to continue to use in the future, I'm wondering what you wouldn't be able to do just in the Finder. You've said the actual Lr database isn't of much value to you, so at the import stage why not just run through the images in Finder, delete whatever you want to right them, and then move on to any Lr specific or NAS activities from there. You'll still have the same use of the Trash, and it's easy enough to use quickview, large icon previews, and a shortcut key to assing a Finder label to bad images. Then just sort by labels and hit delete. I'm not honestly suggesting that as a good option, but it certainly is an option and seems to fill most of your requirements, especially since it doesn't care where the files are.
That's exactly what I've been doing all along. Two problems: Preview capabilities are really limited and I have to delete the RAW+JPEG pairs manually.
Then LR came along and now Adobe took the newly won comfort away.
I find it hard to believe that your simply not having a few extra gigs of HD space on your laptop or using a different backup service would create such a distinct workflow that the (fairly extensible) Lr import/management system becomes useless. But hey, maybe it does.
Indeed it does.