Losses at injection into the superconducting LHC can adversely affect the machine performance in several important ways. The high injected beam intensity and energy mean that precautions must be taken against damage and quenches, including collimators placed close to the beam in the injection regions. Clean injection is essential, to avoid spurious signals on the sensitive beam loss monitoring system which will trigger beam dumps. In addition, the use of the two injection insertions to house downstream high energy physics experiments brings constraints on permitted beam loss levels. In this paper the sources of injection beam loss are discussed together with the contributing factors and various issues experienced in the first full year of LHC operation. Simulations are compared with measurement, and the implemented and planned mitigation measures and diagnostic improvements are described. An outlook for future LHC operation is given.