Since LR3 beta can’t convert LR2 catalogs it doesn’t get the benefit of having the thumbnails from your LR2 catalog. Normally, when you import the images previews should have been generated. In this case it looks like that didn’t happen for some reason.

The easiest solution is to generate new previews for your images, no need to reinstall or re-import anything.

1. In the Library module, under the click “All Photographs” under the Catalog panel so you can see your entire library.
2. Select all the images using either ctrl+a (win) or cmd-a (mac) or Edit -> Select All
3. Goto Previews in the Library menu and choose either Render 1:1 Previews or Render Standard Previews

You might also want to check next time you go in the import dialog to make sure that you’re building some kind of preview when you do more imports. In the full import window, it’s the first thing under File Handling on the right side of the window.

I just checked under Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3 Beta and both appear to follow the system Localization preferences.

I.e. my Windows install is set to US with dates displayed as MM/dd/yyyy, and they are shown that way in Lightroom. If I change it to yyyy/MM/dd they change in Lightroom on the next program start.

However, all of the dates (at least the ones that are hard coded) in the import dialog are all organized in year, month, day notation. Not US or European notation, this is almost certainly to keep the folders organized by year then month then day in the file-system when sorted by name. It also makes the most sense when sorting them in a hierarchy (i.e. month is a folder inside of year).

If you’re referring to file names that are date based, you can customize those to your liking.

In the Import dialog, under File Renaming, click on the Template field and click edit down at the bottom. A new dialog box will pop up and you can organize the date in the file name however you want.

That said, if you’re seeing dates that don’t follow your localization and aren’t something in the year/month/day format for file names and folders, I would encourage you to comment on it at the official Adobe LR3 Beta forums.

A point about referencer by date. Here in Europe we place the day first and the month second which is the reverse of the United States. This can be confusing if the date is the only reference.

Jack wrote:
(other than manually copying the files to your hard drive and them importing them)

I do that, well not quite.

Since Lightroom 3 isn’t quite workable enough for me to use for anything other than testing, I still do all my importing from cards in Lightroom 2. When that’s done, I sync the containing folder in Lightroom 3.

So if I was importing images shot on 2009/10/22, I would run the import in LR2 to copy them from the card (I use YYYY/MM/DD folders) and go into LR3 and resync the 2009/10 folder and it will pick up the new images.

That works well enough for small imports, 100s to maybe a 1000 or so. I’ve had the sync folder choke and die on an 8000 frame import, at that point I stopped trying.

thanks,
jack