Importing from hard drive to light room

[mrca]

If I load photos to my external hard drive and don't immediately import to light room, when I come back and try to import from the external hard drive the images aren't bright and the import box isn't activated even if I select check all photos. They have not been imported previously. I give up, what the heck do I have to do?

 

[bratkinson]

I think I'd try creating a new catalog when starting Lightroom.

Alternatively, your regular, non-external hard drive may not have enough space available for Lightroom to build its temporary work files. A way to test this would be to put a small number of photos, 10 perhaps, in a separate folder (directory) and try it from there. I'm thinking that LR calculates how much workspace it will need based on how many images are in the directory to be imported from, not how many you've checked to be imported.

 

[mrca]

The cluster flock is if I down load from my memory card to my external hard drive and don't want to take the time right then to cull, I had 500 from a wedding and was exhausted, they are in the catalogue but not at the end. They wouldn't come up with a search. It was a royal pain in the butt to find them in the middle of 10s of thousands of images. I am particularly careful with wedding images and want them downloaded and backed up to a second hard drive immediately. Then I don't use the memory card until I have completed editing and backing up the edits.