I've been a PS/Bridge user for nearly a decade now and I've decided to give LR another try with LR4. While the paradigm shift has been a challenge for my aging and rusty brain, I'm intrigued by using LR as a DAM system (something I lack) in addition to all it's other capabilities.
I have a half dozen or so external USB drives filled with images and it would be great to be able scan thumbnails of what's on them. So I plug in drive one and Win7 assigns drive letter "p." I import all the images to the catalog and then replace the first drive with the next drive which Win7 has assigned the letter "o." After importing those I then replace the second with the third drive which Win7 also assigns the letter "o." That's not good. So now in the catalog the "o" drive folder contains the folders from the first drive "o" mixed with the folders from the second drive "o." Okay so maybe I just gather the folders from each drive into a collection, but evidently collections can only be of images and not folders of images.
The other weird thing is that many of the images are completely lacking thumbnails. It's as if LR generated thumbnail for the first 20% of each folder. I imported using the "standard" setting for render previews. The files are all supported by LR. They're NEF's JPEG's, and PSD's. And I didn't disconnect the drives until the progress bar indicated that importing was complete.
I watched the full series on the Intro to LR4 on Lula, searched the manual and the Adobe site without finding the answer.
I suppose I could make a separate catalog for each drive but I understand you can't search across catalogs which would be a major hassle.
Help me Obi-Wan.
Paul
