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New Year's (Workflow) Resolutions

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Lightroom makes it easy to backup-up, keyword, and add copyright info at import.

We photographers all love to shoot whenever we get a chance, and I think most of us love to play around with making our pictures look great, either in the darkroom or in Photoshop. We'll spend hours learning how a camera trap system works or how to apply layer masks in Photoshop. What we all hate however, is spending the time to develop a proper workflow. It's tedious and takes a different kind of critical thinking than the creative thinking we like to do with our photography. However, a proper workflow can improve our efficiency at processing thousands of images and insure that our images won't get lost in a digital disaster. In the spirit of the coming New Year, I offer these workflow resolutions to get us all on track for a better digital photography world.

1) Back up your data and then back it up again. I'm pretty good at this, but I can do better. The experts suggest making three copies of all digital files on two different kinds of media, and storing at least one copy in a different physical location than your original copy. Lightroom and Bridge make it easy to make back-up copies of image files as you import them from a memory card. At import, I always download my images to one removable hard drive and back them up to a second removable drive. Ideally, I would then make a third copy of these image files onto a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray disc. I store my back-up drive at my house and the original in my studio. I now have images stored on six different removable drives, each with a corresponding backup. As I move files around from drive to drive, I make incremental backups using backup software (I use Retrospect by EMC.)

2) Keyword your images. When first creating an image catalog, keywording may seem like a task that's a waste of time, but as your catalog grows to include thousands of images, it can be pretty time-consuming to find a specific image. By adding a few keywords when you initially process images it becomes easy to find any image in seconds. If you can't spend the time to add comprehensive keywords, at least add the basics that describe the location and main subject of your photos. Lightroom allows you to do this at import. Lightroom and Bridge also make it easy to add the same keyword(s) to batches of images.

3) Develop a naming convention for your image files. I did this 15 years ago when I got serious about creating an archive of transparencies. Like keywording, a good naming convention can make finding that one image out of 20,000 a fast proposition. Because I spent the time to develop and stick to a meaningful naming convention, I can find an individual image in less than a minute. How you name your files depends on what you shoot and how you use your archive. It can be based on location, subject matter, chronologically or some combination of the three.

4) Embed your copyright and contact information in all of your image files. This is so easy—I don't know why some people leave this step out of their workflow. Lightroom and Bridge both let you create metadata templates. Create one with all of this info and then have your software automatically embed it into your image files at import. Then whenever you send an image file somewhere into the digital ether, it already has your info attached.

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