Physical Workflow

[Iguanasan]

Just curious about how people go about managing their photo shoots (without going into too much detail) from a workflow point of view. To give you an idea, here's mine:

1) Pick a location or sometimes just go for a photo walk.

2) Take a bunch of photos! I always make sure I have a spare card and a spare battery though I generally never have a problem with this as my 8GB card can handle a couple of thousand shots and I just don't shoot that much and I generally change my battery before it gets too low.

3) When coming back home I remove the SD card from the camera and plug it directly into the SD card slot on my laptop.

4) Picasa automatically pops up and imports the photos with safe delete set so I don't try to import them twice.

5) I have folders set up as /Photo Storage/2009/July, /Photo Storage/2009/August (soon to make September) etc. which is where I dump my photos based on the date I take 'em.

6) Note that I will usually crop, adjust a few light levels and saturation and B&W conversion using Picasa's tools.

7) If it's a special event I will sometimes put them in their own folder and sometimes put them in a Picasa Album. Either way, I star my favourites and these get automatically synched with PicasaWeb. I then have to push up any that I want to show to Flickr too since I've discovered that the photo community is on Flickr and not PicasaWeb though I like PicasaWeb for sharing with some friends.

8) I put the empty SD card back in the camera and do a low level format ready for the next shoot.

Comments? Questions?

[AntZ]

When I have a lot of pics to process and am not in a rush to get something in particular posting I follow this process when I get home;
1. Import images to Lightroom, in large batches if they can be keyworded separately.
2. Marking the rejects as such
3. Keywording
4. Ranking the remaining pics between 3 & 5 stars
5. Starting with the best of each image(assuming multiple images) process in Lightroom
6. Export/Upload/Post the ones I want to use
7. Maybe go back and mark as reject any surplus duplicates
8. Delete rejected images.
9. Move to my network drive which I have set as an offline folder so it ends up on the network and on my pc.
10.Backup network drive to another network drive. So I end up with 3 copies of my images.

The one thing I don't like about lightroom that I did like in Picassa is automatic delete, so at some stage I have to delete the images from the card.

Unfortunately I often don't follow this order and end up doing more work because I start processing a pic and then realise there is a better one and start all over again. Really steps 2 and 4 are very important steps for me. Especially for the way I shoot. I fully embrace the advantages of digital and may shoot 10-20 versions of a shot when I have time.

[tomorrowstreasures]

workflow? you actually have one???? never does anything the same way twice.

[Iguanasan]

4. Ranking the remaining pics between 3 & 5 stars

This is one feature I wish Picasa had. You can star an image or not star. You can't rank it. I would like to be able to have at least 2 levels. Favourites, good but not favourites, and then un-starred or left-overs.

[Iguanasan]

workflow? you actually have one???? never does anything the same way twice.