I use Adobe Lightroom. I import photos daily from the camera, carefully go through the large number of photos and delete (from the PC) the ones I don't like. However, the next time I import from the camera, the photos I deleted gets copied again and it's a frustration. How to prevent this? Adobe Bridge and Picasa also fail in this regard. Any better way to import?
PS: I'm not willing to format the SD card.
Noticed the same issue, here's what I do: At the lightroom import screen, sort by date then click uncheck all. Now scroll to the first image in the current import and click on the image. Scroll to the last image in the current import and Shift-Click on the image. This will select all the images in between. Check the import check box on one image, this will select all others. Import.
I think you have three options here, given your desired workflow:
A. Before importing, delete the images you don't want to keep from the card, either in-camera or via a photo viewer on your computer. This makes me a little bit squeamish, not because this is likely to cause bugs or make the card go bad but because there's a lot of room for human error and you might delete something you didn't want. But, having done this, you then only import the photos you want.
or....
B. Don't delete the unwanted images. Use the selection features in Lightroom to highlight the ones you want to keep and hide the unwanted ones. This uses more disk space, obviously, but, eh, disks are fairly cheap these days. You can even move the low-rated photos to a cheap external drive.
But I think overall, I think the best option is to find a different way to present your photos to your friends in the field. You could start accumulating them on a separate card, and swap that in if asked. Or, you could put them on your phone, which probably has a better, bigger screen and nicer photo viewing options anyway. The particularly nice thing is that then your friends are seeing your finished work, rather than just going through a huge number of unsorted snaps. That's probably nicer for everyone!
I just manually copy the new files from the sd card to my hard drive, and then do my import....
Yes, there is a better way: after you imported your files, format the SD card. This way you will only import any picture only one time. And also, if you use the SD card filesystem from a computer, it may leave it in an improper state, so it is better to format your card. It is not a full format, just a quick format, so it does not affect the lifetime of the card considerably.
Edit: Don't use your SD card as your fail safe backup, because you are up to big surprises. Keep backups offline, away from the camera, away from file I/O. Buy a separate card, an external hard drive or save them in the cloud, but using the SD card as a backup is a very bad idea, as many has already learnt from experience...
