# Double Import / Virtual Copies



## Yashima (May 18, 2018)

Hi,

for the future I plan to just import to mobile and let Lightroom do its sync.

However, before finally figuring that out the other day, I created another (hopefully final) catalog mess from my last vacation (I am talking about ~1300 photos / ~700 after initial round of rejects)

*What happened? *
1. While traveling I imported photos to my ipad and from there to Lightroom Mobile
2. Instantly began sorting pics (flagging, rating and in some cases a bit of processing)
3. Get home, import pictures into Lightroom Classic (<-- that was mistake 1)
4.  I see that I now have all the pictures twice but decide to deal with the issue later as it should be easy to figure out which images came from where (<-- mistake 2)
5. Keep sorting stuff on ipad because it's comfortable
6. Go back to classic for processing and realize there are duplicates and Lightroom (being too smart for me) has decided to make my pre-sorted (and sometimes processed) pictures into Virtual Copies of those I imported into classic and those I meant to throw out are now the "master" copy which when removed will take the Virtual Copy along with it.

_(Possibly un-related? In the meantime I had finally started backing up my other originals by adding them to CC and I suspect that's what created the mess from my last vacation)_

And finally here is my question...

*Question: *
a) can I make the virtual copies into the masters?
b) alternatively: can I "copy" all the work I did from the virtual copies to the masters in one go?

I only use virtual copies in rare cases when I want to test different kinds of processing on the same picture and I really really dislike having extras -.-

I am afraid the answer will be "copy every rating and processing manually to the master copy, then remove the virtual copy"
But maybe there's some kind of short-cut or trick I just don't know...

Thanks in advance for any tips that speed up fixing this...

Greetings
Yashima

Edit: just added missing words that I only ever notice after posting. sry.


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## mcasan (May 18, 2018)

The wife and I use iPad Pros in the field.  We import to iPad and only do culling on it.   Why only culling?  Because Lr CC/Mobile does not remotely have the same editing abilities as Lr Classic.   Also we are totally missing IOS Photoshop and plugins such as Nik Collection and Topaz Studio.   So when get home we then import the keepers into Lr Classic. on our iMacs where we do have Ps and plugins....and nice large monitor.


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## Yashima (May 18, 2018)

I agree that is probably the smart thing to do.
I tend to do some preliminary checks sometimes to decide if a picture is a keeper, like fix the horizon (I am really bad with that) or check if I can compensate for over-exposed or under-exposed areas. 

My plan for the next and all vacations after is importing to ipad, presorting there, letting sync do its thing and once classic has downloaded the synced originals, I can move the images to the folder I want on my local hard-drive. It really works nicely but I only figured that out AFTER I did the double import this time. 

Mostly, my trouble right now is that some pictures have been matched as duplicates some haven't, and I had marked the classic import as rejects, so now I am going through the whole mess manually, fixing the ratings and removing the rejects really carefully. The processing is less of an issue I can quickly recreate that as I didn't do anything complicated in CC (obviously) ...


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## Jim Wilde (May 18, 2018)

Yashima said:


> My plan for the next and all vacations after is importing to ipad, presorting there, letting sync do its thing and once classic has downloaded the synced originals, I can move the images to the folder I want on my local hard-drive. It really works nicely but I only figured that out AFTER I did the double import this time.


You can have Classic do that for you. In the Preferences>Lightroom Sync tab you can choose your own destination folder for the sync downloads, as well as one of the dated-folder systems as well.


> Mostly, my trouble right now is that some pictures have been matched as duplicates some haven't, and I had marked the classic import as rejects, so now I am going through the whole mess manually, fixing the ratings and removing the rejects really carefully. The processing is less of an issue I can quickly recreate that as I didn't do anything complicated in CC (obviously) ...



Answering an earlier question, yes you can make a VC the Master., however you should check carefully here before you do a wholesale promotion of all the VCs to be the Master. If I'm understanding correctly what you did, you should find that the VC is the Classic copy that is sync-enabled whereas the current "master" copy will not be sync-enabled.....which is all good if you've only edited/changed the VC and not the "master" that you re-imported into Classic. In which case, promote the (synced) VC to "master", the original "master" will thus become an unsynced VC and can be removed.

Obviously complications will arise if you've made changes to the (unsynced) original and want those changes to be synced. You'll have to treat each "pair" on its merits when deciding how to progress in that case.


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## Yashima (May 18, 2018)

Jim Wilde said:


> In the Preferences>Lightroom Sync tab you can choose your own destination folder for the sync downloads, as well as one of the dated-folder systems as well.



Oh  Thank you for that tip. That's obviously more comfortable than waiting for images to appear in "synced from ipad"



Jim Wilde said:


> Answering an earlier question, yes you can make a VC the Master., however you should check carefully here before you do a wholesale promotion of all the VCs to be the Master. If I'm understanding correctly what you did, you should find that the VC is the Classic copy that is sync-enabled whereas the current "master" copy will not be sync-enabled.....which is all good if you've only edited/changed the VC and not the "master" that you re-imported into Classic. In which case, promote the (synced) VC to "master", the original "master" will thus become an unsynced VC and can be removed.
> 
> Obviously complications will arise if you've made changes to the (unsynced) original and want those changes to be synced. You'll have to treat each "pair" on its merits when deciding how to progress in that case.



And now that I've figured out how to set a copy to master... I also figured out that it is impossible to do that for more than one photo at a time. It is only available in the menu "Photo > Set Copy to Master" and it is greyed out when multiple images are selected, so much for that shortcut  Anyway I learned something new and it may come in handy some time.

In my case the VC was the copy synced from ipad and the master was the one I imported into classic, which was exactly the wrong way around. I'll simply refrain from doing double imports in the future and that specific problem will go away 

Anyway it turned out instead of 1k duplicates, I had only about 400. So I decided to only copy over the ratings manually and throw away any edits I made on mobile except for the few 4* and 5* images I had. Luckily that went faster than anticipated.


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