# Suddenly I can't import photos into Lightroom!



## Claire

I have a small photography business so I'm always importing, exporting, editing, and clearing digital files from Lightroom and my HD.
All of a sudden after tens of thousands of photos I've shuffled around I can't import anymore!

My HD has available space and nothing has changed since I dumped photos from the same camera to Lightroom a couple days ago. I'm so confused. HELP ME PLEASE!
It did, however, accept 16 files before it stalled.

Any troubleshooting ideas would be VERY appreciated.

Thanks for your time--
C


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## Brad Snyder

Claire, welcome, sorry you're having trouble. I guess the first generic trouble shooting step is to create a new empty catalog, and see if importing works normally there. If so, you may have a problem with your working catalog. The catalog optimization function Edit &gt; Catalog Settings &gt; General &gt; Optimize may be able to solve such a problem.

That'll get you started. We'll likely need more details, and I'll welcome input from our Mac-based members.


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## Victoria Bampton

Hi Claire, welcome to the forum!

It'd also be useful to know whether there's any error message when it doesn't import. And are you importing from the hard drive or from a memory card or camera?


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## Victoria Marchant

Hi all,

I'm having a very similar problem.

When I connect the my camera, Lightroom picks it up and opens the import dialog, which works correctly. I then click on import and all looks good - but instead of the progress bar moving along, it just sits for about 3' seconds and then stops. No error messages, no noises, nothing - it just stops.

If I create a new catalog, it works fine - but I'd rather not do this.

I've tried optimising my catalog but that didn't help.

I've restarted Lightroom a bunch of times and that doesn't help either.

[EDIT] I went to import the remaining photos into the new catalog so I could at least start working on them and hopefully consolidate later, but now the new catalog is busted too! I can't create a new catalog with every import... [/EDIT]

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks very much,

Victoria


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## Mark Sirota

Welcome to Lightroom Forums!

Does it happen any differently if you read from a card reader instead of from the camera? Or if you copy the files to your hard drive using the Finder, then import from disk instead of from the camera?


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## Victoria Marchant

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the reply and welcome!

I don't have a card reader, so can't test that. If I drop the files onto my hard drive I can copy them in from there - which is great, but not ideal...

I'm going to test with my point-and-shoot tomorrow (need an early night for an early start) to see if it's definitely lightroom or if - gulp - the camera's misbehaving...

- Victoria


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## sizzlingbadger

Victoria your profile shows you are using LR3 Beta, this does have known issues with importing and I wouldn't recommend using it for real work, just for testing. LR2.6 is the latest version.


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## Victoria Bampton

Victoria, welcome to the forum!

To add to Nik's comment (and I'd agree completely with that comment!), some of the known bugs in import are it stalling when it finds a video file, certain tiffs, and if you're renaming with certain characters too, as well as issues with some cameras. It's a pretty early beta build only really fit for playing and testing, rather than real work.

FWIW, I'd highly recommend splashing out on a card reader - you'd save yourself some headaches and wear and tear on the camera too.


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