Best practice on how to edit/organize/archive your photos

OK, although it’s a bit dorky to admit it, photography workflow is definitely a passion of mine. As a professional photographer, I take hundreds of thousands of images in a year and I want to spend as little time as possible at my desk, organizing, selecting, backing-up, and editing. Everything I do at the computer is at the service of getting to the end results I love, in the most efficient way. So here are few tips on how to speed up your workflow if you’ve got similar goals to mine, even if your image count is more manageable.

TIPS FOR THE HOME PHOTOGRAPHER using a phone camera only ( or mostly)

1. Make sure you’re using one of the backup services namely iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive etc. to back up your images to the cloud. When you set this up do read the fine print and make sure that it will store your high resolution (full quality) images and not just small web resolution versions and be sure you know what happens when you delete image from your device.

   iCloud for example will delete anything in the cloud that you delete from your phone and it will store only low resolution images on your device if you’re low on storage keeping the high resolution versions only online. So if you want to free up space on your iPhone and you want the images to stay in the cloud you’ll need to look at a another service like Dropbox.

   To use any of these services it’s really pretty simple, download their app and follow the directions once you open it, check the preferences in both the app and in iPhone settings.

   Because I have a Dropbox account already I use that service and if I need/want to clear my photos off of my phone they won’t ever be deleted from the my Dropbox account.

2. Back up at least once a month to a laptop/desktop and put the images on an external hard drive for safe keeping. I like this one and this one. You can use iPhoto on a mac or just the finder in Windows to do this move but put a copy on your computer or better yet an external hard disk and consider putting that into a safe place.

3. If you’ve gone on a vacation or you have another large sum of images to go through use the computer to find the winners. It’s faster and easier to check focus on a bigger screen. As you’re going through the images use the philosophy of EDIT IN instead of EDIT OUT. This means you’re always focused on finding the best images. Try to be ruthless, the less keepers you have the better your archive will look. You can use iPhoto to heart images or a dedicated photo viewer like Photo Mechanic but, either way, take the time to edit and you’ll love yourself later.

4. Keep a folder of the solid gold images. I love to keep a folder every year of my 5 star images. The ones I really feel are amazing. I keep a copy of that folder back to my phone so I’ve always got my favorite stuff at my finger tips.

5. Wipe your phones main camera folder semi - often and put things you want to keep into what Apple calls Albums. This will keep you from the mindless scrolling to find that one picture. Think about how much better it would be if all your vacation photos were in one album and not in just the ‘Recent Photos’ gallery.

workflow TIPS FOR WHEN YOU’RE USING A ‘REAL’ CAMERA

1. Buy fast memory cards. To be more specific, buy the fastest memory cards you can afford and/or the fastest cards that are designed for your camera. Not only will this give your camera better performance in speed saving to the card but, it will drastically speed up the transfer of images to the computer compared to the older/normal speed cards. Also, buy the type of card reader (if your computer doesn’t have one built in) to match the speed of your cards.

   A quick breakdown of SD cards just as an example - SD cards come in two physical types- UHS Type I and UHS Type II -with the newer type two having more connection pins on the back. Some cameras can take advantage of those pins and others cannot. If you have a newer camera, 2019+ , my guess would be that you can use and benefit from the slightly more expensive but much faster UHS Type II cards. If your camera is older you might stick with the UHS Type I cards, although, you could still benefit from the faster type as they will download to your computer faster than the older style.

1. I hope I don’t have to say this but I will anyway… back up your images. I really believe in and abide by the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies of your work on at least two different drives and one stored off site/online. This means you can’t keep every image you have on your laptop’s hard drive- please, please, please don’t go that route. At a bare minimum, buy an external HDD and back up to that and the cloud. Even if the cloud is just your selects, at least in a catastrophe you’ll have the images you love most. If you need a great external drive check out this one and this one.

2. Software… choosing software is a one of the hardest decisions you have to make as you think about sorting, editing, and saving images. The good news is that there are lots of options but each one has a different set of strengths. To pick the right one I think you have to answer a few questions. 1. Am I going to want to make advanced edits to my images? Examples include removing objects, detailed skin softening, compositing, etc. 2. Do I think I might want to upgrade to something really advanced in the future? Meaning, should I pick a brand like Adobe so that as I learn my skills translate to new software? 3. Cost? Do I want to pick something free just to get started? 4. Is laptop/desktop editing just too much and I’m going to stick with what I can do on my phone?

   Here are three quick recommendations. 1. Adobe Photoshop Elements ($99) I love this idea because there is no subscription and the tools you use can translate to other Adobe products like professional Photoshop CC and even Premiere. Photoshop Elements has most of the same tools as Photoshop with a few less options but nothing essential is missing. 2. GIMP GNU (free) This is freeware that is a pretty full featured replacement for Photoshop, at least for most people and a totally free way to get the job done.

3. When you’re choosing selects from a bunch of images you’ve taken - EDIT IN NOT OUT. As you’re going through your photos be looking for winners not rejects. This will save you a lot of time and you’ll be more focused on what matters - the winners. This mentality was born of my newspaper days where we were typically looking for just one photo among hundreds but it works so much better at cutting things down to what matters. It will be faster and you’ll be happier with your final take.

   If you really want to go “pro” here take a look at http://www.camerabits.com and their product Photo Mechanic. It’s simply hands down my favorite tool for selecting and organizing images.

4. Take the time to rename and/or keyword your images so you can find what you want down the road. You can do this with many programs but maybe the simplest is just to make sure you’re renaming your images with a date and location at a minimum. Most editing programs have a method of batch renaming and doing that as a regular practice will make your future self SO HAPPY.

5. If you choose to shoot raw images then learn the workflow secrets of your raw conversion software to synch edits across multiple images and put the final selects into an online storage system. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel as your editing, learn to use import presets, syncing. If you don’t know what raw files are or don’t care to know, you probably don’t need to worry about it.