Verifying which photos will be skipped BEFORE doing an import.

Question

When doing an import, is there any way to tell which photos will be considered "duplicates" BEFORE I actually do the import?  It's a little complicated to explain, but I'm in a situation where when I do an import, I sometimes end up importing photos that I thought would be skipped as duplicates.  When this happens, I have to go though hundreds of photos and manually select and delete all the duplicates.  If I could see that this was going to happen BEFORE doing the import -- i.e. if Lr could give me a list of photos that would be skipped before doing the import rather than after it -- I could take appropriate actions before doing the import.
Thanks,
Larry

Answer 1

johnbeardy wrote:
You could set up a smart collection to pick up files with "-2" in the name.
But why the copying back and forth? Can you not keep your catalogue pointed at the central drive? If for example you need to go offline or have local copies for a while, you could use the Update Folder Location to switch the catalogued folder between your local drive or the central one. It sounds like there''s some aspect of your workflow that's making things in LR unnecessarily awkward.
John
The "-2" could pick up other files.  I use dates in names, so "2009-08-20" would be picked up by the search.
Regarding the "copying back and forth," the issue stems from the fact that the "central drive" is NOT a "Lr" drive.  The photos on this drive are accessed by more than one person using more than one application.  This would lead to complications if I actually manipulated these photos in Lr since each person would have to constantly worry about keeping everything in sync, including making corrections or changes to the folder structure.  By having a completely separate copy of everything on my own "local" drive I don't have to worry about this.  I also end up with a completely "clean" backup copy of all my photos on the main drive in case anything gets corrupt in Lr (although I do also keep ANOTHER backup of my LOCAL drive, so I have multiple redundant backups.)
As I mentioned earlier, it's difficult to completely explain all the aspects of the setup, but suffice it to say that it evolved over time based on the issues that arose for us.  There are a LOT of factors to consider given any particular situation (too many to even list off the top of my head), but my setup satisfies "most" of my parameters in relatively simple ways.  Unfortunately, there is no way to completely resolve "every" issue (hence this thread) -- my setup is simply the best approach I've found given MY particular needs.
In other words, given all of my (our) particular needs, I don't believe that this setup is "unnecessarily" awkward.  It's perhaps more complex than other setups, but given the situation of multiple people, multiple networked systems, and multiple applications, I think it's actually "relatively" straight forward.
Larry