How do you manage your photographs???

I find LR much faster in use than iPhoto, both in processing speed and in the interface. LR was developed for pros processing large numbers of photographs, and it shows.
I'll never be a pro, and I'll never be processing more than a very few at a time. There is a lot I like about LR, but photoshop is my processing choice, ergo, not much point using LR... or is there... ?
 
I'll never be a pro, and I'll never be processing more than a very few at a time. There is a lot I like about LR, but photoshop is my processing choice, ergo, not much point using LR... or is there... ?

I like Lightroom as a "front end" for file management, raw conversion, and basic edits like cropping, rotating, and distortion correction. If you shoot raw and have the most current version of ACR installed in Photoshop, the raw conversion should be just as capable as Lightroom. However, if your copy of Photoshop is getting old it may not be compatible with the latest ACR.
 
I’ve just rationalised I hope!
I shoot 90% in RAW
1). Run LR on both iMac and MBP using Catalogue on external hard drive
2). Import into LR Catalogue on external hard drive_1
3). Delete all “duds”
4). Keyword and tag
5). Use smart collections
6). Export (some) smart collections, i.e. 5* bird images from S Africa, as small 800 x 800 jpegs into desktop folders on iMac and copy to Nexus 7, for me and ipad for my wife.
7). Back up Catalogue from external hard drive_1 to external hard drive_2, every other day …….. if I can remember….I have 2 x 1TB small portable drives
8). Back up external hard drive_1 to external hard drive_3, every week
9). Images organised into years, then months and sometimes specific folders ....... I use tags, flags, collections and smart collections for specific groups of images

I use LR for most of my processing with the occasional excursion into Elements and if I am feeling brave into PS

if you use LR - ALWAYS delete images in LR, (as opposed to anywhere else on your computer)

(so far I have not experienced problems with processing speeds between external drives and iMac/MBP)
 
I'll never be a pro, and I'll never be processing more than a very few at a time. There is a lot I like about LR, but photoshop is my processing choice, ergo, not much point using LR... or is there... ?

There is much to be said for staying with what you know as long as it is easy and is giving you the output that you desire.

One thing to consider is cost. LR is certainly considerably less expensive.

A lot depends on what you do in your editing. For most people, LR, perhaps with a few plugins, is more than capable. It's like a lot of things though; it takes a little time to understand it. If you have access to a Library, borrow Scott Kelby's LR book. It takes you through a flow step by step. More and more photographers are spending almost no time in PS. It does do some things differently, some better, and it does some things LR cannot - but most users barely notice.

All that said it may be wise not to change too much. Be comfortable with what you use. I suspect it is too easy to get anxious about these things. Make sure your photos are organized and backed up. After that, edit with what makes you happy.
 
There is much to be said for staying with what you know as long as it is easy and is giving you the output that you desire.

One thing to consider is cost. LR is certainly considerably less expensive.

A lot depends on what you do in your editing. For most people, LR, perhaps with a few plugins, is more than capable. It's like a lot of things though; it takes a little time to understand it. If you have access to a Library, borrow Scott Kelby's LR book. It takes you through a flow step by step. More and more photographers are spending almost no time in PS. It does do some things differently, some better, and it does some things LR cannot - but most users barely notice.

All that said it may be wise not to change too much. Be comfortable with what you use. I suspect it is too easy to get anxious about these things. Make sure your photos are organized and backed up. After that, edit with what makes you happy.

PS has lost me over the years .... it started off being complicated but now it is a maze, (to me anyway) - unless you are a pro and use it all the time with the very latest in hardware it is really tiring
Elements is good for what I need that LR does not have ....... and in the UK it is only £50 .... a steal at that price
 
I really don't know how to work with layers, so even elements leaves me cold. I have used elements for some of it's photo merge tricks, but I find even elements complicated compared to LR. But, then I see sometimes videos from users doing cool tricks with layer blending and I think "I should take a class in that" but then never do.
 
Perhaps it would be wise to do as suggested. I can't afford to u/g Photoshop again, but as you, Pelao, point out, LR is a *lot* cheaper. I know nearly all I do in PS is also doable in LR. I'm actually more willing to consider it right now, as I have got rid of the thousands of dupes (yes, there were about 10,000 which were duplicates or even triplicates of the originals) so bringing it all into LR might (now) be the better option. One tool instead of two? possibly. I'll see if the library has the book you refer to.

I am backing up my iPhoto library as I type, and will reconsider once thats done.
 
Hi Gary, I have 3. As for the rest, yes, I am aware of the various capabilities of each program, but have decided that I do not want to edit in LR, nor Aperture. So if I am *only* using iPhoto to store the photographs and to keep them in some kind of manageable order, I can't see the point of using something like either of those more comprehensive tools, just for storage. I have been using Photoshop since CS2 on the Mac, and find no effort in using the tools it provides. I can drive it well enough for my purposes...

I understand. I never really got into ps.. But for those who have, I know that it is a great tool.

Gary
 
My D.A.M. is a multiple step process and a little complicated for most pixelroom cataloging software to deal with. First, I do not name or catalog any of my photos based on location or subject, that is what keywords are for. Secondly most cataloging software like Lightroom, Capture One, and OnOne do not name and separate my photos into proper folder hierarchy.

I name all my photos like this, “©nivaun-rahne_nrYYYYMMDD_000000”. The folder hierarchy is what throws the applications off. It looks like this:

  • YYYY
  • YYYY-MM
  • YYYY-MM-DD
  • ©nivaun-rahne_nrYYYYMMDD_000001
  • ©nivaun-rahne_nrYYYYMMDD_000002
  • ©nivaun-rahne_nrYYYYMMDD_000003


The only software that I have found that does this reliably and I emphasize “reliably” because some do this hierarchy but on a very limited bases, is PhotoMechanic Plus.

What PhotoMechanic Plus does is create my folder and file naming settings, insert all my copyright as other information, and then put it on my portable hard drive.

Then I open Capture One and add those photos to the catalog. This is where I do all my keywording so that I can find photos easily. The keywords are placed in an .XMP file for other apps to read such as OnOne which I also use sometimes.

Since 2012 I have completely erased anything Adobe off my computer. I passionately hate Photoshop/Lightroom and anything Adobe for reasons that are my own. Until that time I had used Adobe in the newspaper and advertising industry since the beginning of Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and later Lightroom and that is all I plan to say. For many people it is a good solution, just not me.

So my workflow looks like this because I live on a bicycle touring the world:

  1. From SD Card move files to a camera acquire folder.
  2. Open PhotoMechanic Plus to import files to portable drive.
  3. Open CaptureOne and add photos from portable drive to catalog
  4. Keyword photos using CaptureOne.
  5. Every few days copy files to a portable backup drive.
  6. When in an area of good WiFi send all files to my NAS.
  7. When portable backup drive is full I send it to my sister and get a new one.
 
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LOL!

Well, seeing as we have revived this thread from the dead, let's pull the string a little bit.

Like most, my scheme have evolved over the years.

I've been shooting since '99.

Until 2006, my management scheme was, less than optimal. Grab some shots, read them into whatever storage media I had, if I was really diligent, I burned a CD (to tell you how long ago this was)

On August 29, 2005 my home town of New Orleans was visited by an evil witch named Katrina. In preparation of bugging out for the storm, I had plugged a USB storage drive (a full sized 5 1/4" HDD in a case) and ran xcopy mirror to download my images from the SCSI mirrored drive pair in the server onto the USB. We threw everything in the car and drove to Houston.

After we were settled in the hotel room, I plugged the USB drive into my laptop and it was empty. NADA, zilch, zippo. In my horror I realized I had mirrored an empty drive onto the drive in my computer, thus wiping out all the files on that machine. Oi....

As you might expect, the computer in question was a tower system and was on the floor of the house. When the call came from a friend that my house had been the recipient 10 1/2" of nasty, dirty brackish water courtesy of Katrina, I really began to get worried.

After the ok was given to return to the area, my family and I drove back to the house. It was s surreal situation with a thin later of dirt left by the receding flood waters covering the floor. It was a slab house and we had a floor outlet in the living room that was still full of water. By the time we had gotten back, the power had been restored, so the entire ground floor of the house was "energized". Luckily I realized this before walking in. The breaker was near the outside door, so I tripped the mains and then was able to enter the house.

The house was a mess, but the first thing I wanted to do was check my server. Yep, water mark halfway up the side of the case. Yep, drives mounted in the bottom of the case.

Opening up the case, it as full of dirt, but a lot of the metal had been eaten away by whatever lovely stuff was in the water. I pulled out the 2 Maxtor drives and the SCSI card. and threw the remainder away,

I've spent my entire professional career in the Offshore Oil and Gas ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) business, so I knew exactly what to do with electronics that had been flooded. WD-40 to the rescue. WD-40 is what we always used to clean off contaminaed PCB's and such after a sea water intrusion.

Everything was thoroughly cleaned up, dried and thrown in a large ziplock bag with a large bag of desiccant. I didn't have time to worry about the files, other matters were more pressing....

Many months later, I was talking with our corporate IT lady about the subject and she volunteered the usage of a derelict desktop she had to see if the files were recoverable. So I brought the drives and card in, plugged them into the box, downloaded the drivers for the SCSI card and everything booted up. The drives, after having been underwater for over a hour fired right up.

Using recuva, I managed to restore virtually every file that had been deleted. Some 15,000 worth. It took a couple of days, but there were less than 100 that were not salvageable.

I was so gobsmacked I sent Maxtor an e-mail about it whole affair. They offered to replace the drives with new versions if I would send them the old one as they wanted to examine them. :)

Once the house was rehabbed, we were able to sell it and a job opportunity arose in Northern Virginia where we currently reside.

After moving in to a rental townhouse, the first thing I did was buy an Infrant ReadyNAS to store my imagery on. The main reason for this particular unit was it was small and had a handle on the front. If we needed to bug out again, just shut the thing down and take it with you. Scar tissue if you will. The likelihood of mass flooding in Northern VA was miniscule, but I was prepared.

Sitting down, I began the thought process of how to store the files. I could go into great detail, but a picture is worth 1000 words as they say. This is a screen grab of my folder/file layout:

files.JPG
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)


I've gone through a myriad of DAM app's since those days. I started with iMatch, which was very powerful, but way too user hostile. I migrated to iView MediaPro, which worked pretty well until deprecated by my "friends" at Phase One.

Eventually I bought a copy of LR5 and upgraded to LR6.

In each of these, I set up ingestion schemes to automate much of the file handling as possible. I still use LR6 for my DAM as it supports all three of my cameras. It's not entirely automated though.

I'll insert the SD card, and fire up LR. I'll do an import into a folder YEAR/Date format which is created by LR. Once all the files have been ingested, I'll assign the appropriate metadata, most importantly providing a caption. As I shoot raw/jpg pairs (don't ask me why, I really couldn't tell you), I use the filter to select raw first and then tap F2 to rename them, followed by the jpg's. Once LR is finished creating previews and stuff, I'll rename the folder with the caption as you see above.

Letting LR write all the appropriate info to xmp files and the catalog, I'm done ingesting. Now that I'm no longer gainfully employed, I'll play with writing a LUA script to automate all this.

Following that, we have a trip to Capture One for postprocessing.

That's my workflow!

For others, there is a lot of good workflow info, most written by Peter Krogh, here: File Management | dpBestflow

cheers
 
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I keep the pictures stored in a messy way in folders on my laptop; these are random folders right, left and centre.

I keep the negatives in bind folders with notes about the date/camera/lens/developer. If I can't find the folder on my laptop, I take out the scanner and scan the negative. If I don't remember when or what equipment I used, I look at the negative sleeves.
 
I import picture files by date folders into OM Workspace; work or special event files are imported and the date folders are changed into named folders instead. I use Workspace for basic culling and use both Workspace and Capture One for PP.
Work image files are PP'd, cropped, resized, and saved to a subfolder in the client project as item named jpgs. Files intended for Flickr are resized, named in addition to the original camera file name and a copyright sig attached to the jpg, then put in a folder for upload. I open the photos in Irfanview and attach whatever commentary I may have as IPTC information. This loads directly into the page below the title. As soon as the file is uploaded I delete the original camera file name on Flickr but keep it on my PC so I can easily find the original raw file for future editing.
Files for printing are PP'd, named and saved as 16-bit tif files in a suitable folder.
 
Years ago I used the long defunct Aperture program for management. I liked it but got sick and tired of the file structure continually getting corrupted which in turn put me off storing raw and jpeg files in similar hierarchical fashion in Lightroom. So I keep it extremely simple; store raws and edited jpegs in the computer's folder structure via date order. I just use Bridge/PS/LR for importing, processing, resizing and exif only. Raw files get archived to an external drive every 6 months or so to free up HD space, JPEGs stay on the hard drive. I've always ensured that the internal drive on my computer is big enough to facilitate this, the standard 250GB you get with MBPs these days just won't do.
 
I've been using a relatively simple method for the last decade (I got this from a pro):

• Photos are transferred from SD-card to iMac into a
• Folder with year, month, day and name of place or event (e. g. 23-06-11 Bern, or 21-07-15 marriage P & M)
• All photos that do not meet my expectations are directly deleted
• Those that I work over in PP get ".1" , so P7056907.JPG becomes P7056907.1.JPG
• All remain in the same folder, so if I want to process differently later I have the original at hand.
• After PP the complete folder is archived on an extra photo HD (2 TB) and then I make an incremental backup on a my 3 TB HD.

The bigger HD is the bootable mirror of my 2 TB iMac. Like this I have all photos on two different HDs.
The folder names make sure I find everything easily. And the double storage makes sure I don't get into troubles if one HD causes serious problems. (I've only had two HD crashes within 30 years, and I've never had any serious data losses due to mirroring my HD.)
 
My system has some similarities with that of wee-pics and rayvonn above -
  • Transfer photos/videos from SD card to a dated/descriptively named folder within a dedicated Pictures & Videos folder on a specific drive on my PC - example folder name "2023-07-02 Swallows on the gutters"
  • Rename files using Bulk Rename Utility, using one of various templates depending on the camera - typical filename format YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS_Camera Model_Original filename - example "2023-07-02-15-13-14_G9_PANA4073"
  • Open full folder in DxO Photolab, dot about and edit/tag photos I'm drawn to; export as jpegs with suffix _dxo, thus "2023-07-02-15-13-14_G9_PANA4073_dxo" (means I can then search for edited images by typing dxo into Windows Explorer)
  • Upload DxO edited photos and most videos (resized to >1GB if necessary) to Flickr into albums with titles matching my Windows folder titles - thus Flickr album also named "2023-07-02 Swallows on the gutters"
  • Automatic backups of all RAWs and Jpegs to Backblaze, mirroring the structure of my PC drive
  • Occasional extra backup to an external HDD
I've been using the dated/described Windows folder structure for over a decade and find it works well for me - I can generally remember when I did certain things or saw certain animals, so it doesn't usually take me long to find a specific image. I like to have things arranged chronologically.

Perks also - this filesystem is application and (pretty much) OS agnostic. In the unlikely event I start using Lightroom, I won't have to worry about exporting some DxO catalogue - if I go full radical and switch to Linux some time, my filenames and folder structures will likely translate just fine.
 
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All my original images are stored under a single folder named _All_Images on drive J:. This makes backup and other manipulation simple.

When ingesting, the original camera filename is embedded in the ingested filename. I always keep that filename, no matter what I do to the file, or what prefix or suffix might get added. This makes finding all derivatives of any given file dead simple. Unlike my brother, who renames all his files, and consequently has dozens of copies all over multiple disks in his computer. Finding the duplicates is a nightmare!

All edited files remain in their original folders.

If you are a Windows user, EVERYTHING.EXE is wonderful for finding files.

While my file naming and handling is a lot more complicated than this, suffice it to say, I have individual sub-folders for each camera under _All_Images, then subfolders for each card name and date of initial use.

These methods allow everything to collate in a logical order.

When I've worked out how to use WordPress on my website, I will upload the document that describes my full methodology.
 
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