Photos will be in the gallery, when I bring the gallery online after sorting out all my photos.

• Manually dragging over from the card to the hard drive
• Using the application’s built in method. (Most applications have this feature built in)
• Using a plugin to one of the applications.

My preferred method is to drag the images off the card onto my desktop and then use the Import from Camera Script to rename the images from the source folder and use the RAWxxxx target folder and attach my copyright & basic metafile template. This could be done in one step, by transferring and tagging at the same time from the card to the computer, however it’s possible that the transfer will fail or become corrupt. Although there’s an extra step involved I feel copying is safer.

Using an application’s built in tool may work for you but it should be able to preferrably attach the copyright/metadata while it’s transferring/renaming the images. This will eliminate an extra manual step later on.

As for the naming scheme, it should be easy to sort by and be relatively short since keywording is a much better way to organize the library. Right now, I’m sticking to this file format: NB_YYYYMMDD_UNIQUEID.ext but later on I will convert to NB_YYYYMMDD_UNIQUEID_CAMID.ext where NB are my initials, YYYYMMDD is the date format of the shoot , UNIQUEID is the unique ID of the image as shot by the camera (file number) and CAMID will be the camera identifier. It could be the name such as 10D or simply a camera identifier such as 01, 02..etc if there are several cameras of the same model, the ext bit is the RAW file extension.

Also, a bit of caution, I chose not to move my files into the RAWxxxx folder because if I add files a few days later and attempt to rename them to my standard format, the old files will be renamed once again, which I don’t want to happen.

After successfuly moving the files onto the desktop, I can format my card in the camera to be used for the next shoot. Now the real work begins…

• Download the images to the hard drive
• Back up my originals
• Eliminate images of poor quality. (Don’t go overboard here, some images may gain value over time)
• Adjust White Balance
• Keyword
• Add copyright data/metadata/IPTC
• Label (Optional)
• Convert from RAW to TIFF or PSD (for editing master copies)
• Convert from RAW/TIFF/PSD to Large JPG
• Convert from RAW/TIFF/PSD to Small JPG (for websites/galleries/contest submissions)
• Convert RAW to DNG for forward compatibility. (DNG - Open RAW/Negative format developed by Adobe)
• Adjust Exposure
• Edit the image to maximize quality
• Catalog the Images

Now, that’s a whole lot of stuff to do, and it could take a while, unless you optimize your workflow process. By organizing the steps, a lot of unnecessary work can be eliminated.

Once the images have been captured, they must be transferred from the capture card to the hard drive of my workstation. There are several ways of doing this effectively. However, before I jump into this, I sidetrack to explain why this step is not as easy as it sounds.
Initially, as many others, I tried to organize my images by theme on my hard drive. This may work initially but quickly falls apart in scenarios like this: I go on vacation with a friend to Alcatraz in San Francisco. Does the shot get filed under my friend’s name, Alcatraz, Vacation or San Francisco? The solution I came up with is to divide my workflow into two different “layers”

To me, the logical layer is very important beause it offers a completely different way of organizing photos. By thinking logically and using well defined keywords from a controlled vocabulary scheme it becomes a lot easier to find all the photos with a specific keyword. For example, suppose I go to Australia every other year for vacation. I spend some time in Sydney and some time in Cairns. The photos I take in Australia are tagged like this: “Australia, Sydney, Vacation” and “Australia, Cairns, Vacation”. I also add other keywords that are more specific to each image. If the shot had a Kangaroo in it, it would be keyworded as such. Then, if I am looking for vacation photos, I can search by the “vacation” keyword. But if I’m looking for just Cairns vacation photos I could search for “Cairns, Vacation“. Even though the images are in separate folders they will still be found. Which is why having two separate layers makes sense to me.

Of course you probably don’t want to keyword and edit images you’re going to delete so my first step was to decide what order I am going to perform tasks in.

The best analogy I can come up with is to think of your photos as books. A library does not buy 5 copies of a book to file under the author, subject, genre…etc. What they do is file the books in one way and you can look up books in several different ways using a catalog or in this wonderful day and age, a computer. This makes everyone’s life a lot easier. Applying the same concepts to photography will make digital asset management a lot easier as well.
The first bit I’ve adopted from the DAM book, is about physical file organization. I start out with an “ORIGINALS” folder as my main container with subfolders of approximately 4GB chunks. The 4GB chunks are split further by individual shoots. For example, if I was shooting at the Bronx Zoo and used up 6 x 1gb cards then I would have the following file structure:

[img place holder]

ORIGINALS

–NB_RAW0001_20060316

—–BronxZoo

——–imgx

——–imgy

–NB_RAW0002_20060316

—– BronxZoo

——–imgz

What this gives me is the ability to combine folders when optical storage sizes increase. It also keeps my archives in a chronological order. The subfolders will also be small enough that thumbnail viewing will not take a long time and software packages will not run into out of memory issues or other limitations. It keeps things a lot more manageable. After my image files are properly “filed” the hard part of creating an easily accessible logical catalog begins…

Another quick way to make it inefficient and slow is to repeat tasks several times. This can be accomplished by choosing the wrong software or by doing things out of order. For example, some programs are aware of Adobe’s XMP sidecar files while others are not. Trying to decide what software is right for you is a difficult process because you can either lock yourself into using a single software package or have to re-do some work at a later date to transition your image assets to a more standard format. Decisions!

Onto my workflow…

My aggitation with UPS stems from the fact that they are a lousy shipping service along with DHL (Airborne Express). I don’t think they give a damn about their job. Which is sad. FedEx on the other hand is always helpful and forthcoming with help when I need it. Apparently the lazy UPS man decided to just skip the pickups for the last 2 days and that’s why my Amazon return hasn’t shown up in their system. It’s just sitting downstairs along with 15 other boxes that have to go out. So, Amazon will get their wrong lens after all and I won’t be dinged for 1400$. Now let’s all hope the UPS picks up the stuff today.

My workflow is still in the process of being developed so I will modify it as necessary.

One of the best things you can do is pick up The DAM Book and read it. There’s a lot of good stuff in there about organization of images and how to tweak your RAW workflow to tailor you.

This is my take on this (navigation is also available to the right):

1. Introduction
2. Camera Setup
3. Physical Layer
4. Logical Layer