Howdy. I've been using Lightroom 3 for a couple years.
Recently, a friend passed away. I went to look for photos of him and realized that many were missing. I've since found a few of them on Facebook, and suspect that some are lurking in old backups (of my files in general, not necessarily LR backups) on various hard drives. Things are desperate enough that I want to do an Import on *every single freaking image* on my 7 external drives and my internal drive, and yes, go through and weed out the little non-photo images that the system finds in all sorts of places on my hard drive.
But! Despite having clicked the check box for "Do not import suspected duplicates," I see that it wants to import thousands of them. Some are photos that I recognize from browsing through my master catalogue -- images I already have. Others are photos that haven't yet been imported -- but when the system finds multiple copies of those files (most of these from my IMAP mail attachment spools) it wants to import all of them, even though they are the same photo and often the same filename. We are talking tens of thousands of pictures, so I'm not keen on going through by hand and un-clicking all these duplicates.
Anyone know if a later version of LR can do this better?
Also, if later versions of LR help the user handle duplicates that are *already* in a catalogue? I've bought some scripts/plug-ins that help do this work, but it's still multi-step, very time consuming, and dodgy.
My needs are that of an amateur photographer who doesn't need much technical stuff (e.g. i have no idea of the ISO or the lens type of any of my photos, and am unlikely to start following that information later). I do need organizational help and I love the ability to develop quickly. But I've been constantly vexed by trying to get all the photos in the right place. An "expert" I hired to help me set up on LR recommended having different catalogues for different projects. Later, the entire Interweb pretty much shook its collective LR finger at me for having multiple cats, and so I made one big master catalogue. And since then, things have been pretty screwed up. I'm not sure whether I should bother to upgrade, or simply leave LR and try my luck at something else.