Need advice on good workflow for Pictures

[lokipower]

Hello again everyone.

I have a question on workflow. I have never really been able to get a flow down, and I would be curious how anyone else handles their shots and processing, or leading me to a good site that can help.

I basically want to know what are some ways to take the pictures, get them back to the computer, sort, name and store them. Realizing that I take pictures in both RAW and JPEG at the same time. I may take 2 to 3 hundred pictures at a time, and need a way to go through them quickly, get rid of the out of focus pictures, name create a naming convention for the ones I keep that I can reference, figure out how to include a processing step to clean the pictures up, (likely the RAW images), and how to store them so they are easily referenced. I take a variety of pictures, from nature to architecture, but mostly of my children and family. I say that to say, I REALLY need help with a naming convention too.

I have NOT purchased any software yet, naturally Lightroom and Aperture are among the top, but I still, I would like to know what or how anyone else has a flow that allows for proper processing and good storage, (so I can access them later).

Sorry for the wordiness...

Happy New Year

 

[PCMacUser]

I'm a CS4 user, so I use Bridge and Photoshop for this kind of thing. My photos are organised in a folder structure which goes something like:

Pictures>Subject matter>Date of shooting

If I use Bridge to import the photos from my camera, it automatically creates the 'date of shooting' folders, so that part is easy. As for searching through the photos, if you don't want to use 'subject' folders or you need more complexity, you can assign keywords. Lightroom, Bridge, and I'm sure Aperture, allow you to do this.

 

[scotpole]

I Life

I-Photo by Apple is actually pretty good. I started to work with Apperature, but it seemed to store everything in one mega file that was not easily accessible. I-photo stores files in the Pictures Folder under Users in the finder. You can find and copy yearly or shot folders.

To Import files into iPhoto, create a new album in the file menu or by using the keyboard combination Command N (the clover leaf and the letter N key). Click on this Icon in the left hand list of your albums, and the work space to the right will be blank. Select your pictures and drag them to the blank work space in iPhoto and they will be imported into that album.

In the library view of iPhoto, you can delete photos and they are permanently gone from your library. If you delete photos from an album they are only deleted from that album and are still in the library. So it is possible to delete your imperfections and no one will be the wiser.

If you look at the library icon in iPhoto, it will tell you the date and time that pictures were imported into iPhoto, so even if you do not create or forget to create an album, a record exists.

It is also pretty easy to connect a camera to iPhoto and bring your pictures directly into the program.

To organize pictures in an album, go under the view menu, select sort, and choose the manual function. In that album, you can organize pictures anyway you want from a particular shoot or a group of pictures. In the library they are still the way those pictures are dated and entered into the computer.

If you go under preferences, you can specify to open a photo editing program, such as PhotoShop when you double click on a pictures icon. Or if you click on a photo icon and drag it to PhotoShop in your dock, it will open Photoshop and open the picture in Photoshop.

The other place to organize pictures is the finder itself. Under Documents I have a folder with all my processed photos. Under this Photo folder I have separate folders that may contain pictures or other folders with pictures. When I am looking at pictures in folders under the finder I can choose view Icons in the view menu. By choosing the view options, I can in the icon view represent those thumbnails at 128x128. Although a small size it is large enough to show me what the picture is about.

OK so I organize pictures in the documents folder and not the pictures folder. Why would I do that?

I can drag the document folder to the icon of an attached hard drive along with my other documents, and all my documents and pictures are backed up at one time.

One final thing. Whenever you do a photo shoot, Make a CD or DVD of your shoot. If something happens to the computer you have your CD collection of your photos. CD's are real cheap. Think of them as the negatives you always carefully put away and preserved in a shoe box.