In Adobe’s Lightroom 3 (as in 1 and 2) when importing photographs you may chose the size of the preview for the photos being imported. I’ve learned the hard way why importing 1:1 is the best option if you have a good amount of photos to work with, but first a little background.

When importing photos in the top ‘File Handling’ dialog there are four options for rendering previews.

1) Minimal – This is by far the fastest option, when your on the run and need to just get the card onto the computer as fast as possible this is a decent choice. However Lightroom will only render very small low quality previews, when you are browsing your photos you’ll have to wait for the photos to render again to full resolution.

2) Embedded and Sidecar Preview – Lightroom renders previews already present in the photo or sidecar file. Sometimes there can be issues with the embedded images and they are typical not as accurate as fully rendered Lightroom files. If there are issues with the files you’ll have to rebuild (re-render) the photographs thus taking even more time. I have never found a value in this options, but in a very narrow set of circumstances this can be useful.

3) Standard – This option will render new previews large enough to view the images in the Loupe View. This will take longer then options one or two, and is an OK starting point. Some people argue that this is the best option for import since you can quickly go though and see all your images on your full screen. However since the 1:1 ratio has not yet been rendered when you zoom into the image you will have to wait for it to generate. This can become a nuisance since often times I zoom in to insure the image is sharp, check noise etc. The wasted time sitting behind the computer waiting for every I zoom into to render really adds up.

4) 1:1 – This option will render a full size 1:1 ratio image for every file imported. This option will take far longer then the other options, and will increase the size of your catalog. However, you will be able to review, sort, zoom in and edit your images with no wait time. This allows you to sort, rank, edit much faster assuming you have anything more then a handful of photographs.

For my work flow I have learned the hard way that importing photos at 1:1 is really the only option. A good example of why this is the case is on a recent trip I took close to 1,700 22MP photographs, I imported them in the hotel room as minimal size previews. This worked OK for being on the road, I just really wanted to make sure the photos where off the card and backed up. Now once I got home and moved the catalog into my master Lightroom catalog and I started sorting the photos. It was between taking 5 and 10 seconds per photo to render the full size image. It was going to take me a lifetime just to sort the photos. Until the full size image was rendered I could not fairly judge the quality of the photo. After wasting an hour, I had Lightroom generate 1:1 reviews for everything (more on this soon). This took close to 3 hours but I was able to just walk away and let it run. After this had finished I was able to quickly and accurately determine the quality of each photo, chose the picks, sort and edit.

I should note that my desktop at home is a massive Mac Pro tower with two Xeon CPUs and 16GB of ram, and it still took a little more then 3 hours to render the photos.

I have determined that unless I am in a huge hurry its best to let Lightroom build the full size 1:1 images at the time of import. Sure it’ll take a lot longer to get the photos in, but you don’t have to sit around the computer while they are importing. Once the first import is done at 1:1 you’ll be able to sort and edit in half the time.

If like me you made the mistake of not generating 1:1 previews on import and you are bashing you head on your desk waiting for the full size images to load not to worry there is a easy fix. You can select one or more photos, in my cause I just selected every image in the folder (all 1700 photos from the trip), and went to the ‘Library’ menu and selected ‘Previews’ then ‘Render 1:1 Previews’. I then walked away and let Lightroom do its magic for the next 3 hours. When I came back, I was able to sort the picks out of the 1700 photos in at least half the time if not more.

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