I shoot a lot of pictures so sorting, editing, and using them can be cumbersome. Over the years I have moved around from application to application trying to find a good way deal with all the data. The biggest issue for me is that the application doesn’t get in the way of my organization of images, but works with it. I don’t want my images stored in some kind of ‘library’ file, I want them stored in flat folders that are easy for me to move around as I need to.
Up until recently I was running Windows or Linux on my desktops but over 2007 I switched to the Mac platform full time. I’m not suggesting you need to do the same, the applications I use and my workflow will work equally well in Windows or Mac, but it seems important to know where I’m coming from.
When I pop a memory card into my computer Adobe’s Lightroom loads and helps me to do a first pass of organization and tagging. For me this works very well. I keep my images sorted but year, month and then the date of shooting for storage. I do this even if an event happened over multiple days. This is a low level sort that I allow Lightroom to handle, it’s importing wizard is very good and has no problem managing the photos correctly. When I’m importing though I will import one event at a time and I will redo the import for each event even if I have multiple events on a single memory card. I do this because at the import stage I do basic tagging on my images. For instance, when I returned from vacation I imported the weeks shots into Lightroom in one feel swoop tagged with things like 2007, vacation, Maine, as well as more focused tags like ‘2007 vacation Maine. I know it seems redundant but it helps later down the road.
Once the import is done I do a first pass of deletions. At this point I’m looking to drop all ‘bad’ images. For instance, an image that is too out of focus or has too much camera shake is deleted. I’m not going to like it later so I don’t need to keep it and back it up. I will keep imperfect images though that I like but when I’m shooting, especially in low light, I will often take several images of the same thing to ensure a good, sharp photo. First pass deletions usually comprises about 20-25% of my shots. Once that is done I close Lightroom and run a backup to my Raid server. I don’t like to edit on the day I import, I find I delete too many images and make too many bad choices. I need more time between myself and the shoot. I delete based on technical details and not based on framing, composition, straight horizons, ect.
I’d like to backup using something like rsync or another program that only updates the changed data but I’ve not found one I’m really comfortable with yet so I usually use the apple command line tool ‘ditto‘. It’s not pretty and it’s time consuming to have to make a full copy of 100GB of images (and growing) every time I import a few hundred photos. I need to put some time into this but, like I said, I don’t like to edit the images right away so backing up overnight isn’t usually a big pain for me.
When I’m ready to do some more work on the images I fire up and Lightroom and enter the folder called ‘Last Import’. It hold images from… you guessed it, your last import. As I mentioned I sometimes do multiple imports back to back so I will sometime do this step immediately after one import to get ready for the next. Do it when you think it makes most sense. Once in the folder I do more tagging. I’m not too nit-picky about tags but I do sometimes want to look at images of fire, or of water so I like to have some general tags set. If I’m in a really good mood I will even go into detail and tag things like peoples names that I have a lot of images of. I won’t do this on all images but if I have an image of someone that looks good, I’ll tag their name onto it. From here I sort things into what Lightroom calls ‘Collections’. This is where multi-day events get grouped together. On longer events I will also create sub-collections to help me find things later. If you only have a few thousands images these things won’t be a big deal but when you shout 1600 images over a weekend it helps to be able to zero in on what you want. If you forget this step and do another import before it just use Lightroom to zero in on the date folder and do the sorting from there.
Now that all of that is out of the way I can start to enhance the images. I know the sorting process seems long and cumbersome but it’s something that will only take 5-10 minutes to do if you stay on top of it. Having to do that for a months worth of shooting would be a hassle but if you do it piece by piece it’s easy and great to have for later.
The editing process for me is very challenging. I try to take images exactly how I want them to look in the end but that’s not always possible. The issue is further compounded by my color-blindness, so please forgive me if my images have funky colors sometimes… they look great to me 🙂
I don’t ‘edit’ my pictures as most people do. I have Photoshop but I almost never use it, a little sharping or straightening is usually all I will do. I just can’t be bothered. I like to go out and shoot, not sit at my desk and edit. If I’m doing a ‘studio’ style shoot where I looking for something specific I may really dig in and make an evening out perfecting a shot, both on camera and in the computer, but images from a hike or a vacation are almost never edited in Photoshop. To date I’ve never done it.. but never say never.
At this point I’m very happy with Lightroom as part of my work flow. I like the interface and it has the tools I need but I try to use it as little as I can. On my aluminum iMac it runs pretty well, especially now that I’ve added more RAM to it. With the standard 1GB of RAM apple offers with the iMac it can be sluggish when you are moving around and looking at a lot of images very quickly.
So, after all that sorting what does it really give me? Speed. When I load up I want to be able find a certain image very quickly. I don’t want to dig through 1000 pages of thumbnail looking for that one image. With all the tagging I do I can quickly search for water, maine and night and pull up some images very fast. Do a search for fire and voila my screen fills with exactly what I’m looking for. When you need to find something it’ll be worth it. If you can’t find and use your images, what’s the point?
My final step in the process is to export from Lightroom some of the better images to get them ready to post online. This is going to sound crazy.. but stay with me. I export from Lightroom full size, full quality jpg images and import them into iPhoto 08. This serves two purposes, one is that I create good quality jpg images regardless of what the source images was. I shoot mostly in RAW format so it ensures that 10 years from now when the D300 and D40 are distant memories I can still look at and use my images. The second reason for this is because I use iPhoto to get my photo’s online at my gallery using the .Mac service. I used to run my own photo-gallery server but it was much too much work to use and incredibly time consuming for me. The fringe benefit here is that I now have my images stored off site separate and away from my iMac and my backup. I’d hate to loose any of my photos but at least I can get back the best ones should something really horrible happen…
I do no editing or sorting in iPhoto, it’s just a portal for me to mange my online gallery. I have it setup on all my macs so at any time I can load up iPhoto and see all of my online images even though I keep my full image database at my house. iPhoto downloads all the images from online and keeps them in sync with each other across your macs. A great feature.
Does any of that make sense? The only critical step is backing up. One day you will learn the reasons for good backups but by the time you learn it, it will be too late. Take my word, and the word of any decent geek, backup early and backup often. Something else that can be handy to know is that you should always format the memory card on the camera just before you use it. I don’t delete images from my card using the computer. When I’m ready to shoot on a card again I pop it into the camera and format it there. Every. Time. Just be sure to remember to do it, it’s annoying to fill a card only to realize that 50% of those shots you already have on your computer…
What is your process?
Topslakr