Lightroom: Auto Import & Convert to .DNGs from watched folder

If you import from a card reader instead of a watched folder you can do this. Why go through the work of copying your files to a watched folder? Does it provide an advantage over the direct import into the LR Catalog via a card reader?

i am shooting wirelessly and sending files to my watched folder via Eye-Fi on 5D MKIII... sort of wireless tether in effect.

That is why i want it on the watched folder import workflow as well as when importing from card reader.

This is a good "poor mans" wi-fi solution which works great but currently have the added step of converting everything to .DNG after the fact.

Thanks...

Then you are limited to a conversion after-the-fact workflow I am afraid.

On a side note, I am curious about how you find the transfer speed of a MKIII file across Wi-Fi. I have shot in situations with wireless transfer on smaller files and found it to be too slow to be useful compared to direct cable tethering.

As an enthusiastic amateur it is more than suitable for my home studio setup... it is definitely a little sluggish when transferring RAW files but i have to say a lot faster than i expected having read loads of reviews. If you are in a high pace environment clicking away at multiple frames a minute it is not for quick review on the PC but if you are just bumbling along as i do it is great! Wired tether for working at pace is invariably going to be cheaper than the Canon WLAN unit :)

I tihnk it's a great idea too!

Import from a card is a no no for wedding photographers. We need backups and doing it twice is too much.

I'm using a Nikon D7000, which has two SD slots. I have a normal 16GB SD card in slot 1, an Eye-Fi Pro X2 in slot 2, and the camera set to use slot 2 as backup. So I have a copy on the SD card and the eye-fi will send a copy to my Mac. I have Lightroom watching the Eye-Fi folder to do an auto-import. I too wish Lightroom had the option to convert to DNG during an auto-import. It's nice to take some photos and then go to my computer and they are already in Lightroom, but it would be better if they were already in DNG.

I would also like to have this feature. It would be ok if we only had the option of selecting an "Import preset" for the feature to use. At least then I could set up a preset that does a DNG copy and allow it to put it in a particular folder with the correct date format, keywords, etc. It already allows you to do most of those things with separate menus anyway.

The cleaner/more elegant method (from a UI standpoint) would be to take all of those out and just allow you to select an Import Preset (then just create presets with your various settings that you can use in the dialog).

See the difference here:

What I'd like is for auto-import to do the exact same thing as manual import, just from a watched folder instead of clicking a button.
I want it to:
- Convert to DNG
- Put images in my library folder under a dated folder
- Use any new shiny options I find as I use Lightroom more