What is your organizational process?

[elifant]

Sorry if this has been covered in earlier threads, but I'm new here and a little overwhelmed. I am working solely with lightroom as of now. And I'm wondering what your process is for organizing and saving work. Right now I take RAW images off my memory card, upload them to lightroom, edit them, and then save the edits by date taken or by project. Then I take the RAW unedited images and also save them to an external hard drive. And save the edited images to the external. So far space hasn't become an issue on my computer, but I image at some point I'm going to have to remove some older photos from the lightroom folder. I'm a disorganized person by nature, so just wondering if anyone has any tips.

 

[The_Traveler]

work flow

 

[JClishe]

Amazon.com: The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers (9780596523572): Peter Krogh: Books

 

[KmH]

+1 on the DAM Book.

Since Lighroom is database mangement software and can only open 1 catalog at a time, it is highly recommended that all your photos be kept in a single catalog.

Many people that have Lightroom simple do not make the volume of images image database software is designed for, and actually bought Lightroom for it's secondary and limited image editing function.

 

[adversus]

My workflow is thus:

1. Import directly into Aperture, letting Aperture manage my library (saves me time). Pro tip: Let Aperture/LR finish processing your import BEFORE you start culling. During import I also setup keywords and other meta-data
2. First run through (Bad shots): I use a rating system, 1-5 stars. First run through I spend 2-3 seconds per photo and mark a 2 star I want to look at further. Weed out all the bad shots (accidentals, out of focus, etc.).
3. Second run through (OK shots, things that can be fixed in post), jump to 3 stars
4. Third run through, shots I'm going to spend time processing, jump to 4 stars
5. Edit my 4 stars, anything I post online or send to someone gets a 5 star
6. Export my 5 stars into my Export folder using Image Date/Time as the Filename.

After editing:

-Backup Aperture library automatically to my network backup
-Backup my library automatically to my online backup service
-Cry that my photos are not as good as KmH's or Bitter's

 

[adversus]

I forgot to say, when I import into Aperture I import into a project for the given year (2011, 2010, etc.) and a date the image was shot under each year in the following format (YYYY_MM_DD). For finding specific shots I rely on my huge library of keywords.

 

[elifant]

Thank you for all the advice. I definitely need to work on my organizational skills!