Import smartphone photos into Lightroom (without getting album art, thumbnails, etc.)?

I haven't taken a ton of pictures with my smartphone previously, but I just upgraded to LG's G4, which has a decent camera interface, and saves files in DNG format. It's not without flaws (whoa--seriously need corner fix/flat field corrections), but it has made taking pictures with a smartphone fun, and sometimes worthwhile.

However, now that I'm importing more from the smartphone, I'm pounding my head against limitations of modern Android devices and the way Lightroom imports from them. At least with Android 5 (and I think 4.1+), there is no longer an option to mount the phone as a universal mass storage device; you can choose MTP or PTP, and in either mode, Lightroom gives you no granularity of choosing to import from a sub-folder; you can only choose the entire device. That means that you import everything it thinks is a picture. So far, with the LG, Lightroom seems to be ignoring the album art (likely because I have that stored on a microSD card, and photos are on the internal memory?). But it is definitely grabbing all of the thumbnail jpgs that Android's Gallery viewer generates when you browse photos on the device. This is distracting, and the space usage will eventually add up. Does anyone have a great fix? Even if there were a way to flag files in Lightroom as "don't ever import this, even if it doesn't exist in the catalog."

My not-so-great fix is to connect the smartphone, browse to the DCIM folder from my OS file browser, and manually copy the contents to a folder on the computer. Then I can import directly from that folder, and later delete the interim folder on the computer. It works, it's just two annoying, extra steps. I may end up scripting that, but surely I'm not the only Lightroom user with a smartphone who dislikes scattering random non-picture JPGs in an otherwise organized catalog.

One option I haven't fully examined is a piece of (Windows) software from Cranking Pixels that maps an MTP device to a drive letter; in theory, Lightroom would then let you browse to the /DCIM/ subfolder so that you only import actual pictures you've taken, not any picture data that happens to be on the mounted volume. More info at MTPDrive.com--but it's a $40 license, so I'm not super jazzed about that solution.

I use Dropbox on my phone to automatically transfer the pictures I take to Dropbox and, as a result, my computer. Then I manually Syncronize the Dropbox folder in Lightroom. It makes it very easy to get your phone pictures to a place you can do something with them, including delete them.

That's a great idea! Have you gotten it to work with .dng files? I tested mine, and it's only uploading .jpg files. There are third party, two-way sync apps for Android/Dropbox that will upload any file you specify, like this one:

https://play.google.co​m …s?id=com.ttxapp​s.dropsync

However, the free version has an 8MB file limit, so I'd need the $6 pro version.