Obivously there’s no point in wasting energy on images that definitely do not make the cut.

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I’ve spent a bit figuring out my personal workflow and it wasn’t an easy or fun task especially because I did not know where to start and what to do…I’ve given some thought to creating a logical workflow and I’ve documented my progress up to date so others who are less familiar could make educated decisions when developing their own. Check it out, and feel free to contribute.

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Well, I finished the task of organizing everything on the physical layer and made a backup (Phase I), which already came in handy since I somehow nuked 3 images. I have a total of 8 DVDs worth of photos. Each ~4 gb chunk consists of subfolders containing the location & approximate date of the last shot. Now the logical sorting begins but I ran into a minor problem. Apparently Photoshop/Bridge do not come with a quick and easy way to analyze the technical qualities of the photo. Primarily the focus of the photo. There’s the slide show option but that does not have a nifty Magnifier tool like Raw Shooter Essentials/Professional has. As I was typing this, I searched for an XMP aware image viewer and came up with Photo Mechanic 4.4.2 which does exactly what I need to solve my problem. It lets me preview the images @ 100% and it’s quick.

On a side note, yesterday evening i had a brilliant idea that my computer needed more RAM (which it did, with only 640mb). As I pulled out some ram out of my other computers I got a little ambitious and figured since I’m already moving stuff around I might as well get my fastest computer and put the video card & ram in there and slowly move my stuff from this computer (second fastest) to the faster one. Well, I put the memory chips in and it kept giving me a continuous beep which was a memory problem. I fiddled with the memory some more and accidentally put in the stick of memory the wrong way. Well, once I powered up the PC I heard a crackling sound and a very distinct smell coming from within the PC. I quickly turned the PC off and analyzed the situation. Testing the memory in the other computer resulted in all 3 modules still working fine (I hope that’s the case). Everything showed up as 512 and worked. But the computer that it happened in did not POST or show anything on the monitor. Which probably means I fried the motherboard. After looking closely at it I did notice that one of the ICs was puffy and had a dark bubble on top of it.

Only means one thing. Time for an upgrade!

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I’ve struggled with proper image organization for years. And now I understand why.

For years I considered the optimal way of putting the photos into folders on my hard drive and I was mislead by my own mind. The issue was that you always know what you’re looking for, but you can forget what path to take to get what you want.

For example, if you go on a trip with a friend to San Francisco does that image get filed under friends, trips or san francisco? Well, it gets filed in all 3 places but how do you manage that with folders?

The answer is very easy. Use cataloging software to keep track. My organization was 1 layer of a mess. If you separate your archives into 2 layers (physical & logical) it will make your life a lot easier. The physical layer should be optimized for backup purposes. In my case, I plan on backing the archives up as follows: PC will have a pair of hard drives in mirror RAID configuration (one disk is a mirror image of another), External USB hard drive and the most important DVD disk backup. DVDs can hold ~4.7 gigs of data. I chose to keep my physical layer in 4 gig chunks.

Instead of creating folders for each project, I will just create a RAW_xx folder and put RAW files there until the 4gb threshold is reached. Then burn a DVD for arhival purposes. In there I can create sub-folders by project but if months later I shoot more photos of a bald eagle I will not put those photos into the existing baldd eagle folder in one of my RAW_xx arhives. Now, how do you keep track of all of your bald eagle photos? Easy, keywords and metadata! You can assign multiple keywords and later on searching for bald eagle will show you all the images of the bald eagle from your archive. If you want to narrow it down like “bald eagle, new jersey” it will show you only photos of bald eagles in NJ.

Nifty!

This is where my mind was broken…I thought of everything in a single layer. Now with addition of the logical layer I can reduce the amount of time I have to spend organizing the newly captured images.

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