Improve your Digital Workflow

There are infinite combinations of needs and impossible to cover all cases. So in this article I will describe mine, and my experiences that has lead me to the workflow and software that I am using today.

From the beginning, I wanted to have complete order in my library of files. At the time, that meant ordering photos by the date they were shot. This has changed a couple of times, and I will discuss those changes further down in the article.

Ordering the files by date, simply meant importing the files from the camera or the cards into folders that were named by year,month and day and with a description. Like this: 20090102 - Fredrik and Sara
In the beginning I also used a time stamp, but that was abandoned as the description gave enough info to separate two or more folders created on the same date. 20090102 - 12:13:14 - Fredrik and Sara
20090102 - 22:10:28 - The Moon

Often my CF-cards contain photos shot on different days, and with a variety of subjects. When importing them all into the same date-named folder, the date in the folder name did not necessarily indicate the date the photos where shot on, but rather the date they were imported to the computer on.

That proved to be a problem as soon as I started shooting events like weddings, that was so very much connected to a date. Again, the point of having a good system is that it should be easy to find the photos we are looking for, fast. If I remember the date of an event, and not the description I gave it, then that wont help much if the folder name does not match the date I am remembering.

Luckily this is quite easy to fix once you import the photos, or after searching for hours and finally finding them.

Example: Lets say I come home from a wedding late one evening, a day or two after the wedding is over. I have a few CF-cards that contain the wedding photos. Also I shot some sunrise and sunset pics without transfering the photos and formatting the cards in preperation for the wedding. Anyway, I import everything in to one folder named wit the current date: 20090207 - Nice Sunset, Nice Sunrise, Wedding Olsen
This will cause problems when I'm looking for the wedding I shot on 2009.02.04. To fix that, I divide the photos into date-named folders, with dates that correspond to the actual shooting date: 20090203 - Nice Sunset
20090204 - Nice sunrise
20090204 - Wedding Olsen
Note that the nice sunrise and the wedding was on the same date. They get folders with the same date but different descriptions. When I search for a folder named 20090204, both of them will show up, but thats not a problem as I will still find the one I'm looking for.

When one event falls on two or more dates, the photos will be split into two or more folders. Thats not really ideal, but it works as long as you can trust your own system and be consistent with organizing your files. One solution could be to move folders from the same event, into one main folder, named as usual with date and description: 20090204 - Wedding Olsen
...20090204 - Seremony
...20090204 - The Party
...20090205 - Family and Friends BBQ
...20090206 - Honeymoon begins
Note that the subfolders still have the full date in their names. That means that if we do a search for "20090204" all three folders matching that date will show up in the result. If you named the subfolders just as day of month, or an index or just the description, they would be a little more difficult to locate.

Now when the files are neatly organized after creation date and events in consistently named folders, its time to organize the folders themselves, perhaps.

Organizing the Folders

With hundreds and eventually thousands of folders, the need to put the folders into categories arose for me. I thought putting all the wedding-shoots into on Wedding-folder, all Artistic Nude-sessions in another, and so on, would help me find photos and shoots more easily: Artistic Nudes
Other Customers
Projects
Portfolio shoots
Portraits
Weddings

The first problem
This worked for a while, until the hard disks started filling up, and I had to split the category folders up between disks. So after a while I spent lots of time moving files between disks, and looking in one category-folder was not enough to get an overview of my all shoots in that category.

The second problem
In addition, I have photographs and shoots that fit in more than one category. No, I have not yet had any nude weddings, but one of my customers is a company that do landscape architecture. When I shoot for them, the shoot it self will fit in "Other Customers", and at the same time the entire shoot or at least some of the photos can be used in my "Black & White Landscapes"-project. That folder is a subfolder under the Projects category folder. Another example would be shoots I do for models, that can be both artistic nudes and portraits, and portfolio shoots for my self.

An easy solution to the first problem, was to rework the category-folder concept. Instead of physically locating the original wedding folders in one master wedding category folder, I created an alias/shortcut for the original wedding-folder, and put the alias/shortcut into the the wedding category-folder. The original wedding-folder could live along side all the other shoots. An alias/shortcut is just a link to the original file or folder, and takes up very little space so the wedding category folder never get so big that it has to be divided between disks.

Using this method, there is no extra work when a disk fills up, as a the folder structure can just continue on a new disk. The alias/shortcut to the folders also enables you to put links to "work in progress" on your desktop for easy access, leaving the original files in place.

The second problem was still not fixed, and it was getting bigger and bigger as the way I worked with my photographs changed.

The Bridge is out

On the 14th of May 2005, I started making photos for my photoblog. The chronological organization in a blog fit perfectly with my way of organizing my photos. Thus it was natural for me to carry on using my date-based folder organization.

Now I still make photographs for my blog, but the way I think of my photographs is more in terms of projects or "bodies of work". I still have photo sessions like weddings, private events, and other commercial commissions that are easily organized to dates. At the same time projects become a more and more normal "unit" for me to mentally put my photographs in. Projects can be bound by dates, but can also be totally unbound by dates. A project can cover one specific theme, but can also be about several themes.

This way of thinking, creates challenges for my date named folder structure. Poor thing. So I need something in addition to my folder structure that lets me not only think in terms of projects, but also work efficiently with projects.

I use Adobe Photoshop for editing, and have for a long time been using Adobe Bridge to browse, rate, cull and to a small extend tag my photos. My main workstation (Mac Pro) is powerful and nice and everything, but now and then Adobe Bridge gets really really slow. One thing that has always been slow, is previewing photos, and especially zooming in to and panning in full size. But when browsing through a small set of like 100 photos also started to be a pain, I knew I had to switch browsing software.

The advantage with Adobe Bridge was, for me with my organized folders and files, that it would work nicely on top of my file structure. It did not try to force me into using any special structure, neither to "import" photos into Bridge. I liked that because after all the photos were all ready on my machine, and importing them into somewhere else did not seem like a good use of my time or my disk space.

Adobe Bridge also has a very nice Rename function that let me keep a running serial number on all of my original files. That meant that no two original files would ever have the same file name. So when any customer request a file called "00128812.jpg" for example, I know that I have a file named "00128812.dng" and possibly also a file named "00128812.psd" somewhere on my disks. Using search in Finder on my Mac (the equivalent to Explorer in Windows) I can very quickly find the file and the folder it belongs in.

Still, the Bridge had to go.

Finding the right tool

I tested LightRoom from Adobe, but knowing the performance from Adobe Bridge, I did not really want to go down that slow road again. Still, it has a lot of nice functionality for organizing photos using tags, ratings and more. But when the number of photos get going, it sloows doooown.

Googles Picasa also lets you keep your own file structure, which is good, but it looks a bit to much "beginner". It has a lot of functionality, and a good web-gallery integration that makes it easy to share photos. If you are looking for a free tool, I would recommend Picasa.

iPhoto from Apple also have lots of functionality that is nice, like ordering books and what not, but compared to Aperture it lacks the pro-feeling, whatever that is.

So after trying out Aperture 2 from Apple for a while, I found that it would cover my needs the best. When it comes to importing photos, I can choose what Aperture should do with the originals. Import them into Apertures secret library, move them to some customizable folder structure (using creation dates for example), or leaving them where they are and just let Aperture refer to the originals. After the import is done, it makes no difference to Aperture where the files are.

The second problem mentioned further up in the article, concerning projects and photos that fit in several categories is elegantly handled by Aperture using tagging and smart albums. Filtering is an integral part of Aperture, so you can filter on all EXIF-data, shooting dates (especially elegant), photo orientation, even aspect ratio and more.

I now do the RAW-adjustments in Aperture, and then the final edits in PhotoShop. Aperture also now handles my most common batch operations. Like converting all PSD-files rated 3 or better to JPEGs to fit in a so and so format, with my watermark and custom folder structure and file names of the output. That greatly outperforms the batch operations in PhotoShop and Bridge, and it is simply because the usability is so much better.

PhotoShop of course has more photo editing capabilities, and Aperture can not replace it in that sense. But the general workflow and file handling in Aperture really helps me out when I am working. PhotoShop and Bridge has from time to time been something I have worked against when working with photos. With Aperture I am feel like I am really working together with the software in a much bigger way than PhotoShop and Bridge.

My new and improved workflow

The thing that has changed the most in my "new" workflow, is that the browsing software I am using now is much much faster than the old software. The time I save there, I can spend on making photographs, for example.

My "new" workflow now looks like this:

• Copy the photos from cards/camera to my main workstation
• Convert RAW-files to Adobes DNG-format (no loss of data, but smaller file size than CR2)
• Import into Aperture, telling Aperture to store the files in date-named folders on a disk of my choosing. This way I can find them both from Aperture and Finder
• Once the import is done (or with Aperture you can start this as the import is running), move the photos into Projects (In Aperture this is sort of a folder, with some extra functionality connected to it), tag and rate the photos.
• Move the original DNG-files to backup (Aperture has copied the same DNG-files in to the date-named folders).

And now I'm ready to start working with the photographs, that are easy to find by date, tags and ratings, and can be parts of several projects at the same time.

This is not a commercial

This was not supposed to be a "Buy Mac and Aperture"-article but I understand if it looks like it. The article just explains my experiences with organizing my photographs, so that you may learn from my mistakes and my ideas.

If you want more information about the software I mentioned, below is a list with links you can follow:

• Apple Aperture 2
• Adobe LightRoom 2
• Google Picasa
• Apple iPhoto