This guide covers uploading photos to Imagen with Lightroom Classic. If you are not a Lightroom Classic User, see Extended Adobe Compatibility to learn about other compatible software.

Uploading photos to Imagen requires an Internet connection. While not mandatory, we recommend creating Smart Previews of your photos since they speed up the upload process.

There are two scenarios when you upload photos to Imagen.

• Create new projects for culling or editing
• Create a Personal AI Profile

Upload photos for a project

Selecting a catalog

The first step in uploading a project is to select the Lightroom Classic catalog with the photos you want to edit:

1. Import the photos to edit into a Lightroom Classic catalog.
2. Open Imagen.
3. Click the Create a Project button on the Home page or the Projects page.
   Home Page
   
   Projects page
   
4. Choose the relevant Lightroom Classic catalog. Click Recent catalogs for a list of the last few catalogs you used. Or click Browse to find the catalog on your computer. You can also drag and drop folders or photos into the window.
   
   If you don't know the exact location of the catalog, open Lightroom Classic with that catalog, and go to Edit → Catalog settings → General tab → Location.
   

Adding photos to a project and choosing an AI Profile

Here are the main parts of the Add Photos page:

1: Select the relevant folders you wish to upload for editing.

2: Name your project.

3: Choose an AI profile for editing.

4: Additional AI Tools - Choose additional actions for Imagen during editing.

5: Filters -  Includes or excludes photos with unique color/rate/flag attributes.

6: Show catalog content by -  Choose either Folders or Collections to list the photos in the catalog.

7: Number of photos selected for upload.

8: Estimated cost of the project based on the number of selected images and additional AI tools.

9: Click Upload to begin uploading the photos for the project. If the button is greyed out, you did not select photos for editing.

Once the relevant photos for editing are selected, a profile name is given, and the editing AI profile is selected, click the red Upload button (9) on the lower right corner of the screen.

Upload process

• Imagen has a background uploader that allows you to continue working with the Imagen app while an upload takes place.
  
• It's possible to add multiple projects to the upload queue.
  
• If you have an Imagen Cloud plan, every project will be uploaded twice. The first time, the project will be uploaded for editing or culling, and the second time, the high-resolution photos will be uploaded to Imagen Cloud.
• After uploading the photos, a processing animation will appear next to the project name. Depending on the number of images and whether additional AI tools were selected, this process might take some time.
  
• The editing process happens on Imagen servers.
  After the upload process is finished successfully, you can close the Imagen app without harming the process.
  

• Once the culling or editing of the project is complete, the Download for review button will become available.
  

• If your upload gets interrupted, don't worry! The Imagen app will automatically resume the upload the next time you open it.

Troubleshooting: Not seeing some/all of your photos in Imagen

If all or some of your photos are missing, hover over the exclamation point icon in the Number of images column to view the number of excluded photos and learn why.
These issues are usually related to one of these reasons:

• Lightroom can't find the photos where they are supposed to be. 
  Also, Smart Previews were not built for them.
  This usually happens when the photos are moved from the original folder they were imported from or on an external drive that's not connected to the computer.
  If you want to learn more about it, go to this guide: Imagen won't show my Lightroom catalog images
  
• Imagen filters exclude images.
  Hovering the exclamation point will reveal details about which filter excludes the images.
  To solve the issue, adjust the Imagen filters and remove the specific attributes that exclude the photos.
  Imagen filters work with these filters:
  • Metadata attributes: Color Labels, Star ratings, and Flags.
  • File types: RAW AI Profiles will automatically exclude JPEG photos and vice versa.
  • Edited and Unedited filters.
    
• In rare cases, Imagen will have problems reading catalogs or images located on external drives.
  If that's the case, move the catalog and/or photos to a local drive and try again.

Uploading photos to build a Personal AI Profile

Uploading photos to build your own Personal AI Profile requires a slightly different Lightroom Classic catalog preparation, especially if it’s your first Creator AI Profile you are building with Imagen.

You must ensure that the folders and photos are connected inside the catalog in case you moved them from the original folder they were imported and edited, or that ALL of those photos have Smart Previews available for them.