Introduction

Taking photographies is wonderful. Taking MANY photografies even more. Not knowing where they disappeared or, worse, losing them defintively is awful.

In this article I want to tell you about my very own workflow for digital photography. Don't expect to find the perfetct guide to digital assets management, because it simply doesn't exist. I've just found that this method works for me and, with a little luck, could work for you, too.

Why

Working every day with computers and new technologies exposes you to this fact: the power of information technology can easily go beyond our control. People tend to consider computers, USB keys, disks, whatever as simple "physical" boxes that need to be filled with "things", which that can be retrieved anytime as needed; they don't realize that those "things" actually are informations. And there are also a lot of them, and too much fragile. With any digital camera o mobile phone it's easy to take hours and hours of pictures or footage. Creating huge archives of our memories is, at least theoretically, much easier.

Unfortunately, many of these expectation are going to stay unsatisfied. Everybody, sooner or later, will lose some or all of his or her data. It's sad, I know, but I'm in no way wishing you bad luck. PC get broken, thunders are... thundering, hard disks break also very often, thieves love to visit houses and grab things like PCs, laptops and disks, even backup CDs!

Having an efficient, choerent, stable workflow can help us minimize the effect of those catastrophes, but also to better leverage our digital assets.

How

Here are the steps of my personal (I will never stress it enough) photography workflow:

• shot;
• transfer to PC;
• (optional) immediate backup on CD-RW or DVD-RW;
• conversion from RAW;
• rating & tagging;
• archival;
• actual backup;
• utilization: search, retouch, etc.

This is the process, summarized in steps. Sounds complicated? Well, trust me it is not, especially when you, as me, are not inclined to burocracy. But let's not call it burocracy, let me use terms like organization, project focused attitude, order, whatever. Sounds better, isn't it?

So let's see practically how it works.

0 - Preparation

One of the key aspects of this method is that it is almost entirely based on files and directories, so it doesn't require any specific software to work. So let's start creating this directory structure:

/to_do
  /1_process_original
  /2_rating_and_tag
  /3_retouch_or_archive

After every operation on a file I simply move it on the next folder. This way phone calls, email, interruptions of any kind are no more a big problem, because I'm not trying to track everything on some crazy software or Excel table. Put simply, the elaboration stage of a photo is... the folder where it is stored. Easy!

1 - Shot

This is the most amusing part, and of course essential... without photos, there's no workflow. At this stage I have just one advice: shot in RAW, if possible.

RAW can be seen as the digital counterpart of traditional film negatives, and it is the basis for a couple of fundamental operations in digital photography: white balance and exposition tweaking, without the risk of losing information as can happen with TIFF or, even worse, JPEG files. They're precious also because any time you don't feel you achieved the desired result you can take back the original RAW file and start from scratch. Very useful.

2 - Transfer to computer

At this stage I put my images into the folder
/to_do/1_process_original

I put here all original material, be it RAW or JPEGs created by camera itself.

File transfer is an easy operation on most equipment, nonetheless usual care must be used: a small error and you can say hello to your beloved shots! Just a couple of quick notes:

• I prefer to copy files instead of moving them: there's plenty of time for deleting!
• there's no big difference in moving the card from camera to computer or plugging those together with a USB/Firewire/whatever cable. Well, for the paranoid: pay attention when operating the card slot on camera, it is usually a bit fragile;
• pay attention to computer viruses. Too often I've found viruses and trojans on SD cards borrowed from friends!
• when done, make sure you use the "disconnect USB device" function provided by your operating system;
• last advice, format your card every time you put it back in the camera. Actually, every N times you should do a "low level formatting", because it does a deep sanity check of the card.

3 - Preliminary backup

For the data safety paranoid, IT consultants and (more seriously) professional photographers. There's nothing worse than loosing those precious wedding shots. Depending on your luck, you can receive the visit of an attorney or a couple of angry (and kick-boxing experts) cousins of the spouse! Jokes apart, you can easily do a quick backup on a revwriteable media such a CD-RW, DVD-RW or external hard disk. If those shot are not so vital and/or your short of time you can skip this step. You make the decision!

4 - Conversion from RAW

• convert RAW files to low-quality, low-resolution JPEGs;
• leave untouched JPEGs created by camera.

Then I move the JPEGs in:
/to_do/2_rating_and_tag

and RAWs in:
/to_do/3_retouch_or_archive

I must confess that earlier on I used another, more complicated, solution; it was like this:

• tweak white balance and exposition compensation on RAW files;
• convert in TIFF (without compression);
• archive both original RAWs and TIFFs, because in TIFF you can store EXIF and IPTC meta-data.

However, this approach had many drawbacks, mostly waste of time and storage space! Obviously you're free to save your files in any format of your choice, just be aware that not-compressed formats are really space hungry. Moreover, you have original RAWs for special works, so...

5 - Rating & Tagging

This stage, at least for me, is the most boring and burdensome, but it's crucial for correct archival of the pictures. We need to attach these infos to our files:

• Rating: it's an evaluation of picture quality, from one to five stars;
• Tagging: tags are keywords that describe without much detail the pictures they're attached to. They're very useful to assign pictures to many categories.

These meta-data will be saved into EXIF and IPTC sections of the files, and can store many more informations:

• camera information;
• shot settings;
• titles and descriptions;
• comments;
• and much more!

The fact that classification and descriptions are stored in EXIF data is the main reason why I don't ever change the file name of a picture: this way JPEGs act as vehicle of information, while RAW provide the... raw material.

There are many options to execute the tagging operations in a quick and comfortable way, often the operating system itself has some kind of tools (i.e. Windows Explorer), but many people (me included) are more inclined to using more specific software that can handle many files in batch. Maybe in another article I can tell you something about the one I use. The only requirement is that meta-data is stored in the same file of the picture. Some programs, unfortunately even good ones, persist in saving that data in proprietary databases, hidden somewhere on your disk. This makes the entire operation useless, because at some point you'll lose all tagging and rating data!

6 - Archival and 7 - Backup

Now, move files in
/to_do/3_retouch_or_archive

Here your picture destiny is choosen. I personally use this policy, based on rating:

• rating = 1 : delete;
• rating = 2 : reconsider file, by putting it back in /to_do/2_rating_and_tag;
• rating = 3 or more : keep it.

When finished, I copy files onto an external hard disk, where I have this structure:

/printed
  /01
  /02
  /03
  ...
/not_printed
  /12
  /13
  /..
  /temp

SUbdivision criteria is straightforward: every folder occupies no more than 4 Gb of space and new pictures go into temp folder. This way, as soon as temp folder surpasses the 4 Gb limit I rename it progressively, put it on DVD (step 7) and create a new empty temp folder.

If I want to print many of those photos I just cherry pick the best ones, put them on CD or DVD and move the containing folder to printed, even if not all the pictures have been printed.

8 - Utilization

After this workflow, pictures should be easy to search: every operating system or graphic viewer has some kind of search function that can filter on tag and rating. For example, searching for tags like "cat", "summer", "2003" would show up pictures of our feline friend in 2003, or we can search for good seaside shots using "sea" keyword and specifing a rating of 4 or more. Extremely user-friendly, don't you think?

Conclusion

What about you? WHat is your workflow? Do you actually have one? Let us know!

Links

Here are some articles I've found on the same subject:

• What is Your Post Production Workflow? (digital-photography-school.com)
• Develop An Efficient Photography Workflow (picturecorrect.com)
• Quale flusso di lavoro utilizziamo in digitale? (Adolfo Trinca - in Italian language)