Digital Photo pipeline/ organisation

indieJones

Hi, I've been dipping in and out of the forum and have to say you guys have been really helpful.

So I got a Nikon D80 half a year ago and all the photos are starting to become a disorganised mess! I use a mac and I've got some on a portable harddrive, some in iphoto, some more in aperature, some on a flickr and a lot of overlap inbetween! On top of that I've been shooting in RAW & jpeg mode for a lot of my stuff so I've got 2 formats for some photos.

I'm hoping to sort it all out and start a fresh with a strict step by step flow from camera to editing to storage. What would you guys recommend for doing all this (given the software I already have)? I wouldn't mind forking out some dough for a big flickr (or other hosting service) account.

Shiny

My Method Usually.
Insert card. Make (New Folder + Date) on hard drive.
New folder for RAW (and another for JPG in your case).
Copy RAW files into RAW Folder.

When copied, run Lightroom and import photos from location.
Apply relevant keywords, Copyright data and 1:1 previews.
Import.

Once imported hit "Ctrl+Shift+f" to make full screen without panels.

Then rate photos with grades of 1-5. Where 1 is basically delete and
5 is very rare but might be the best photo out of the import.

Then sort by rating and process a few of the best ones in the Develop
panel in Lightroom.

Once finished I then copy the folder over to a backup hard drive and
Lightroom will then backup the catalogue to the same drive the next
time it starts up.

I then convert all the photos to jpg and upload the full size versions to
flickr and set the majority of them to private.

I don't really do much else repeatedly. I process the odd HDR,Panorama in
photoshop.

Overall I'm starting to think the keywording is the most important as it will
allow you to find your photos in say 20 years time when you have hundreds
of thousands of photos.

Lightroom should be fairly similar to Aperture for most of above.

Fajitas!

Right... well, considering you have aperture, I'd import all your photos into that for a start - It's best/easiest to keep all your photos in one place - Just makes it handy for going through them. It should be able to sort out the RAW + Jpeg too, so that they're right beside each other.

When you have everything imported into that, forget iPhoto for the moment, in fact, take your photos out of it altogether, and just work with Aperture.

When you've got everything in here, it's time to think about backing up - I don't know how big your ext. drive is, but they're so cheap these days, it's worth buying another 500Gb, and using Time Machine to back up your whole laptop.

When you've sorted and backed up, then it's time to think about loading online. Pix.ie is free, I don't use it myself because I have so much on my Flickr account - Though that's set to change now that I can download everything from Flickr in one go with a new program. Flickr can be good... or can be annoying... It's about 15 quid a year for unlimited uploads though, so that's handy enough. Then again... Pix.ie is free


As Shiny says, use keywords on your photos. That dosn't mean you have to go back through every photo you've put in already. If there's a few you reckon you'll be going back to, then tag those, otherwise, just start afresh!