How to Disable Lightroom’s Add Photos Feature

Lightroom’s newest updates, LR 6.2 and Creative Cloud version 15.2, were a huge disappointment with the major overhaul to the import module being particularly problematic. The upgrade was so flawed with so many bugs and features added and removed that Adobe issued an apology for their mistake. Now this might not be new for many of you, but I’ve received a lot of questions on how I’m handling the update so I thought I’d share my thoughts here for my readers.

My feeling is that mistakes happen (even at Adobe), but how quickly they respond to the mistake is the real issue. Adobe quickly released an update to versions 6.2.1 and 15.2.1  which did help alleviate some of my system’s crashing issues, but it wasn’t until I turned off the  “Add Photos” feature that my system starting acting somewhat normal. I’m sure intentions where good in that Adobe tried to create an easier way to import photos into Lightroom, but sometimes simplifying things too much creates more problems down the road. The add photo feature brought my system to a crawl and ultimately made Lightroom unusable. The word on the street is that Adobe is working to release 6.3 which will revert back to the old style of importing. While you can roll back your system to a version prior to the upgrade, this does require a few steps with which some of you might not be comfortable. So my recommendation is simply to disable the “add photos” feature. Here’s how:

How to Disable Lightroom’s Add Photos Feature

Step 1

Launch Lightroom

 

Step 2

Locate Lightroom Preference menu and navigate to the General Tab and uncheck “Add Photos Screen.” Once it’s unchecked, then simply close the preference screen and you should be set.

 

 

I also created a video on how to disable Lightroom’s Add Photo feature so you can see it in real time: