Workflow 101
There are lots of applications that can yelp you manage your content, in my case, photography. I still see lots of people struggling with this; they cannot easily find the photo they are looking for, whether it is to share or print. So I thought I would share my workflow with you.
It “works” for me. I can always find what I am looking for.
First, a quick story…I always enter the Utah State Fair photography competition. I do this for lots of reasons, but primarily because it forces me to look back and review my work for the preceding year. I also get feedback from judges on what worked and what did not work. I don’t always agree, but you know, judging is so judgment. The competition has a couple of dozen categories you can enter (wildlife, landscapes, black & white, abstract, humor, portraits and such). You are limited on the number of categories you may enter.
So every year I go through my photos in Lightroom for the previous year. It is easy to find the “keepers” or the ones I want to consider because I put processed images that I like into a folder called “Completed” and Lightroom can search on that. It is just the way I do things.
One year, I forgot about the competition until the last Saturday to submit work. I was able to go to my computer, search for all the “Completed” images for the last year, review them and add the ones I wanted to consider to a Lightroom collection with a simple keystroke (B). I could then review those and either delete the ones I no longer wanted to consider, or add a color code to indicate my finalists or send the best ones to a new collection with a keystroke. It took me 15 minutes to do this. I then printed the ones I wanted to submit and called my local frame shop and told them I had a framing emergency and I was on my way in with my prints and to fire up the dry mount press. An hour and a half later, I am on my way to Salt Lake City to the State Fair Grounds with my entries. It was nice, I won a few ribbons and enough prize money to pay for the gas to drive the entries to the fair.
The moral of the story, I could not have done this without having a reliable and predictable workflow. A little work on the front end; adding searchable metadata to my photos, saves a lot of time down the road.
My current workflow is a far cry from when Dorothy Hooper, the photo librarian at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram would have to hunt me down because I had not filed my negatives (remember film?).
My workflow varies a bit depending on whether I am working at home or on the road. The latter is based on the first.
All of the metadata added during this process is searchable by Lightroom, so Lightroom becomes a powerful searchable photo library. Know the date something was shot, search for that, know the location, search for that, know the persons name or the keyword that might have been applied search for that.
Speaking of Keywords, I found a plugin for Lightroom called Anyvision. It goes through photos you have selected, could be one, a hundred, a thousand and using Google’s tools it identifies the content in your photo and adds additional keywords. I expect as AI continues to develop, you may find this type of functionality built in to Lightroom or other similar desktop applications. I know more advanced content management systems (like Merlin, now Canto) are leveraging AI to assist search. It is pretty amazing.
What a game changer!
So there you have it, my repeatable, reliable photo workflow. There is some setup involved to make it this smooth but there are lots of things you can do that help streamline your process. For example this website was built using Zenfolio. They have a plugin for Lightroom so if I add content to specific collections in Lightroom, it appears in the proper gallery on this website and gets connected to the correct price list.
Why should you trust me? I taught well over a hundred newsrooms and organizations how to use new photo technology while first working for the Associated Press and then for MerlinOne (now part of Canto). Thanks for stopping by.
dgb