Beginner Workflow

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paulca

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Name
Paul Campbell
Edit My Images
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As soon as I started playing with photography as a hobby, using my mobile until I can actually get a new camera, my Google photo's storage alerts keep going off and I have to delete stuff, most of it is junk.

On a larger scale I have a "Camera" folder, which is a mess, it's about 0.8Tb in size and growing RAPIDLY due to 4K video. If I was honest, there is probably about 50Gb or actual "keepers" and the rest is junk, unculled memory card dumps, dozens of 100MEDIA folders with, or without dates on them.

I googled "Photography workflow", but it seems that's a big thing with people selling whole photography management services, not what I was looking for.

I'm looking for process, folder structures, cataloguing, etc. For example, I would prefer to do work on an SSD, but I don't want to spend the money to store ALL my video/photo archives on SSD.

I know some of this is software dependant with various things having their own processes, like "converted" sub folders.

What do y'all do to control the mess and mountain of unsorted data?
 
I've posted my workflow on here before

  1. Go to bed thinking "I'll get up early and catch the light"
  2. Get up late but determined
  3. Throw a random collection of bodies, lenses, batteries, cards, filters, ktichen sink etc. in a bag. Extra points for failing to check the various things are compatible and also for forgetting the waterproofs, gloves, flask, etc.
  4. Drive around randomly, occasionally stop and snap things that "might" work
  5. Get back home, rush to the computer
  6. Import, skim through and delete about 50%,
  7. Have a brew/do something else for a while and/or take an anti-hoarding pill
  8. Go back and delete most of the rest but not quite all because, well, nostalgia.
  9. Do some barrel bottom scraping to pick one that might be vaguely worthwhile
  10. Pretend that my awesome PP skills will recover a work of sublime photography from the selected pigs ear
  11. Process it until it looks like something produced by a five year old on acid
  12. Remember that my PP skills are really not very awesome
  13. Resolve that I will get it right in camera next time
  14. Have a bottle of wine whilst watching youtube vids on why I need better gear to help get it right in camera
  15. Repeat from step 1

this might not help you though
 
Not sure this will help either but I try to make a photo or two. Not really interested in "data".
 
I start with a folder on my hdd called photos(year).ithen create monthly subfolders and then download my days photos into the month folder in date order.
So I end up with photos2021>june>12 and in the june subfolder other dates and photos for that month then I start a new month until dec then I create a photos 2022 and repeat the process.
Then I cull all the junk and go from there which in my case is import into lightroom a d process as needed.
 
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Hi Paul, I tend to store photos in folders by date. The software I use allows me to give pictures keywords (like summer, canal, narrowboat, lock for pictures by the canal) and I use that to look up pictures for canals etc.

Workflow usually refers to the process of how you handle the pictures when you have transferred them from camera to computer. My workflow is to import to dated folder inside a folder for the year. If the images were from something like a holiday then I'll import them into a folder called Greece 2020 or similar. Next sort through and delete the obvious junk (poor composition, missed focus/camera movement, missed exposure etc). After that I'll spend a little more time sorting the images and mark them for further use or just to keep in hand. Finally I'll process and sometimes export the images for upload to the web.
 
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First thing is you need to be organised. Split your photos by date, by shoot, by subject. Whatever works for you but organisation is key.

I use Lightroom which I have set to automatically drop images into dated folders, which are grouped by year. So for example my last shoot on Saturday goes into Photos/2021/2021-06-12. This way all the image files from a given day sit in their own folder.

Within Lightroom I use collections extensively, grouped by event, which are themselves grouped by year. So each year is a collection set, and within that set there are collections of images for each year. So for a two day motorsport meeting, both days will go into a collection together.

I note you mention you just dump your memory cards and then don't cull them. This is an incredibly important step, the first thing you should do when reviewing your images. Go through everything you've taken that day and get rid of the obvious crap. If it's out of focus, poorly composed, blurry or you just don't like it then delete it. Only once you've culled your images should you start processing them.
 
I keep my pictures in folders usually named after places or events or subjects such as "Saltburn" or "XXX's birthday" or "Flower pictures." That seems to work for me. Some folders become massive so I may create a "Best of xxxx" folder too.
 
I have a folder on my C drive called 'Photos'

It has sub-folders for each year, so '2018', '2019' etc

Within the sub-folder for every year there are sub-folders for each month. To make sure they get listed in chronological order I call them 'a Jan', 'b Feb', 'c Mar' etc.

My camera(and I assume it is the same for others cameras) creates a new folder on the sd card for each day. The folders have names that relate to the month and the day. For example, a folder which ends in 0301 contains photos taken on 1st March.

After a day's shooting I copy the whole folder into the appropriate month sub-folder on the hard drive.

Years ago I bought a copy of Photoshop Elements 11(it was going cheap) and I import each day's photos into PSE.

I then look through the shots and try to be rigorous in getting rid of any that aren't good enough(I fail regularly at this).

I then(if I am being really good) use the organiser part of PSE11 to tag and sub-tag the shots to make finding shots a lot easier.

Dave
 
Different people have different methods. For me dates mean very little, nearly all of my folders are given names. E.g. Flowers, this then has sub-folders of the types of flower, e.g. Dahlia, Rose, Peony etc.
I'm not very good at culling on download/import, but every now and then I'll pick a couple of folders and delete a load.
 
paulca said:
What do y'all do to control the mess and mountain of unsorted data?
Click to expand...
I am vicious when I get home from an outing. I have been known to have a quick look at my day's output and delete the lot. I always delete the majority and only keep those that I would be happy to share with Bestbeloved (she is very fussy!). If I produce a dozen keepers in a month, I am doing well.

As for folder structure and such, I rename photos with the location on importing into Lightroom and keyword them. They all go in one of two folders: landscape or wildlife and Lightroom manages them for me as that is what Lightroom is for.
 
I kind of have a system. I create a folder named by subject, location, date. eg:

Paragliding_Algodonales_201210

Japanese date format or truncated to YYYYMM. Placing your date units in descending order means they are naturally sortable. Software engineering tip!

So I copy all the raw memory card stuff from various sources into that folder. For an outing like a paragliding holiday there might be 5 or 6 memory cards; 100+ photos, 30Gb of video and several thousand time-lapse shots. So 40-50Gb.

I'll spend a few evenings editing a basic video and upload it to YT or Vimeo when I get bored refining it.

But I now have the issue that I have referenced lots of these raw media files in video projects and as working out later which ones are referenced is a pain in the a, I instead just leave them all there.

Occasionally I go back through them and grab any actual "finished output" and place it in a higher level folder away from the pile of flotsam it sits with... but still not delete said flotsam.

I'm looking to creating a process which treats media in stages or with "gates" like I would use in a software project. The raw stuff can get dumped as before in the RAW or Inbox subfolder. This would ideally be on network spinning metal HDD aka cheap but slow storage.

A local SSD temporary folder can be created called PROCESSING. Anything which is to be 'used' in any project, be that Raw Therappe, GIMP, Dark table, Hugin parno-stitcher or video editor. Thus all those various projects just refer to the current PROCESSING/<APPLICATION>/ directory and can be moved together easily.

This local SSD temporary folder can be moved back the slow network drive "temporarily" so I can remove projects to clear space for others.

Rendered videos, completed PP'd photos, timelapse videos etc. Can then go into the OUTPUT folder. Ultimately this will contain the finished articles which get uploaded to social media and kept in backups long term.

Ideally, I can go back and remove the RAW folder, once some time has passed and maybe after some more time has passed and I'm 100% sure I won't want to pick something back up and make a change, I can delete the PROCESSING folder.

Here is the use case that makes me nervous and why I don't delete enough stuff.

Say I want to create a compilation of my Paragliding videos covering 10 years. My previous videos were rendered in 720p and due to limited upload speed back in the day, they were often compressed further than ideal.... so they are not appropriate source material for recycling into a new video. If I have deleted the raw MP4 files ... I have no source!
 
Unless I am missing something can't you copy the MP4 files to an large external HDD ( 4/5 Tb £80-100 ) and then delete them from the original storage.
 
troutfisher said:
Unless I am missing something can't you copy the MP4 files to an large external HDD ( 4/5 Tb £80-100 ) and then delete them from the original storage.
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Yes, but over time it adds up.

It's like a pyramid. At the bottom you have a huge amount of incoming photos and video, above that are the ones you actually use/want to keep and then at the top are the few edited photos and one or two videos that you actually do anything with. You are basically storing 75% of junk. Of course the hoarder in me says, "As soon as you delete it, you'll find a use for it."
 
I see , its like the bits of wood syndrome that affects men of a certain age.
When us oldies do anything and we have a bit of wood/Roll of Wallpaper/ Bit of paint left etc we keep it because it might be useful and we might need it ( in fact we never do).
Eventually the shed / garage is full and we have a clear out all the time thinking why did I keep this? its of no use.
Being ruthless is a bit difficult, I read an article the other day on a similar vein that the average household has £300 worth of unused kitchen equipment stared in cupboards.
 
troutfisher said:
I read an article the other day on a similar vein that the average household has £300 worth of unused kitchen equipment stared in cupboards.
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I also read the likes of the bank of England use an estimate of £30-ish quid as "Cash lost or lying around in the average house hold.", ie, stagnant in the economy. We digress.
 
In case you are interested @paulca ....... this is what works for me, well at the moment :)

A folder structure with folder at the top level named after years and below these, subfolders named after the shoot/event/trip and the date e.g.
2010
2010_06_23_Anne_Wedding​
2010_09_01_France
::
::​
2011
2011_07_12_Carnival
2011_10_01_Sophie
::
::​

This structure is then augmented with keywords/tags managed using DigiKam.

I favour this approach because I get searching via DigiKam plus a collection of images that can still be accessed via the standard filesystem when required. Plus your chosen backup/offline archiving process can easily be applied to the folder structure.

A recent addition to my review process is FastRawViewer. A low cost tool that allows a quick cull of images once downloaded from memory card. A useful advantage of FRV is that ratings applied to images carry through to DigiKam.

This is purely a personal view and keep in mind that I'm not a LR/PS user and therefore not comparing against those products.
 
I have an external SSD which I use for my current years photos. I use LR and the folder structure has top-level folders for each month and then a folder for each outing which is "YYYYMMDD - NAME" which might just be the location I went to. When the year is up I will move these to an "archive" hard drive, wipe the SSD, and start again for the next year. The archive hard drive is not connected most of the time, but all of my "good" photos get put into a LR collection on the cloud so I can see them whenever I want to, which means it's just the rest of the photos I'd need to plug the hard drive in to view (never needed to!)

Deleting photos is the hardest part for me. I know future Carl will be better at editing photos and probably have different editing styles or subject tastes. Sofware is getting better every year too, so what I'd call junk now might be useful in ten years. I try and delete duplicates but it's quite time-consuming. I know a lot of people don't even bother deleting any saying "memory is cheap" but if you're ploughing through 1TB a year you soon need a 10TB hard drive for all the backups.

troutfisher said:
I see , its like the bits of wood syndrome that affects men of a certain age.
When us oldies do anything and we have a bit of wood/Roll of Wallpaper/ Bit of paint left etc we keep it because it might be useful and we might need it ( in fact we never do).
Eventually the shed / garage is full and we have a clear out all the time thinking why did I keep this? its of no use.
Being ruthless is a bit difficult, I read an article the other day on a similar vein that the average household has £300 worth of unused kitchen equipment stared in cupboards.
Click to expand...

Well that's depressing. I am 33 years old and I do exactly that. Maybe I'm an old man in a younger persons body :LOL: My shed has a box full of timber offcuts and I even kept the lino offcuts from the new van floor in case I need to patch something up at some point. I know for a fact these will never get used!
 
Funny this is Beginners yet, as I'm reasonably experienced I still ask questions. Anyway.

Interesting read, agree with the non-helpful 2nd post. I'm very like that at times so made me laugh. I gather bits of wood and other bits'n'bobs and I can guarantee that when I throw something out I will always be looking for it a few weeks later! The IT person in me also does the yyyy-mm bit and when I go out for a particular shoot I name it as that together with the location(ish).

For some reason, I shoot both JPG and RAW. I can only think I do that as when I got into Digital photography the in-built apps on the computer to view basic images didn't handle RAW. Clearly, they do now but I've stuck to that method. The other reason, I suspect, is that the jpg gives me a reference point as to how the camera processed the image. It is the culling issue that I still can't find the most efficient way. I want to be able to view images full size to the screen and be able to delete it in one click. Also, I want to to see both the jpg and raw file go as well - thoughts?

The other aspect is what is out of focus - probably yet another thread. Clearly, there is the obvious, but how far do you zoom in to the image to see if it is sharp. There is also s/w that can sharpen to a certain extent - Topaz is interesting for this. What is OoF?
 
My photo workflow is based on Lightroom, but I only ever interact with the photos from Lightroom, if I need to use them in another application I export them from Lightroom. However, to get around the problem that the OP has, I add a colour label to any file that I have exported and/or a star rating to "keepers". Then I have a smart collection folder that collates any files older than 1 year, without a colour or star rating. I regularly delete the files from this collection, on the basis that if I have not done anything with them over the course of a year, I am unlikely to need them.

My video workflow is slightly different, I only keep current projects on my main drive, then archive them, when finished. Projects are grouped into folders by year, then project folders named YYYYMMDD - Project name (date first so that they are organised by date in the folder structure). Each project folder then has photos per camera for "raw" footage, and I always keep a full res export of the completed project in the folder.
 
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