My Workflow | Part 3: First Sweep and Smart Collections on Phill Price | Photography

My Workflow | Part 3: First Sweep and Smart Collections

By now you should have hundreds, if not tens of photos ready to rock and roll, so how do I sort all of mine out?

Firstly After the geotagging and import I move them down a level (as I said on Christmas Day�) to year/month/day – just to tidy it up a bit more.

Folders within Lightroom, three levels

Then I do a sweep through the folder simply to look for the rubbish, hitting X to reject any that are out of focus. In the case of multiple shots reject all but the best quality one. After that – and this is the only time I do it – the magic Del key comes out and deletes the technically poor shots. The rest stay around – for good.

Just because you can’t see a shot artistically now – you may need to in the future. I’ll go over the way I secure the photos later in the week.

For now lets talk about the collections I have set up…

My Normal and Smart Collections

The only Normal Collection I have is basically a private collection – photos I can’t publish as they’re either not mine, they’re scans of other’s photos or they’re of family / in private property.

Then I have 4 collections that are smart – based upon metadata. For some reason I can’t make a smart collection based on another, which is ANNOYING!

The first collection is basically everything that’s from 01/01/08 (Yes I’m gonna detach this collection on the 31st and start a new one – but there are odd bits in this collection from last year – and none of them are any good for publishing)

My "Publishable" Smart Collection

My next collection is anything I’ve rejected for artistic reasons – shots which I don’t really feel – but they’re kept here as every now and again I’ll dip in and pull them back out – perhaps processed in a very different way.

My Rejected Smart Collection

Next is the collection I spend my time in – the one with shots that are to be worked on on a daily basis that I scroll up and down looking for a shot to post that day.

My In Progress Smart Collection

Once the photo’s processed (cough tomorrow ;) ) and exported (cough Monday) I press the giant P button and it goes into the final resting place – the published pile.

My Published Smart Collection

Oh OK there is one last final collection – those that are published and landscape to be exported periodically. If only it was automatic.

The final colleciton - those which go onto my wallpaper ;)

The final collection - those which go onto my wallpaper ;)

So that wraps up collections – tomorrow its the processing bit, you lucky things! Presets and all!

4 Comments

Breandan
12pm, 31/12/08

You may also want to consider http://www.getdropbox.com - 2 GB free/50 GB paid (for $10/month). Does file checksums to avoid the "moved file is backed up again" problem, among other really cool things. And it's seamlessly cross platform, which can be handy.

Brian Auer
5pm, 31/12/08

Hey Phill, I don't have an index on the series yet... I just have one or two more articles to write, then I'll post a roundup along with a big PDF of everything. And Happy New Year!

Brett Veenstra
11am, 01/01/09

Hey Phill! Thanks for a Great series - it was nice to see another Lightroom users perspective and actual use on the application. I currently use JungleDisk with Amazon S3 for my offline backup. Very happy with it so far! Happy New Year!

Edit My Photo Project: Results! on Phill Price | Photography – A daily photograph from London, England
5pm, 06/07/09

[...] Would you like to see how I edit my photos? I put up a series of 7 articles over Christmas:Geotagging, Import, Smart Collections, Processing, Metadata, Export and Backup [...]

Add your comment

I've built a wordpress plugin that uses the API from photo sharing sites to share when people comment on my photos there within this site.