Organizing workflow

How is everybody doing with their New Year resolutions 10 day later?

My “project 365” is still alive, although almost ended up with no image yesterday. I decided to catch up, and had to go around the house in the evening in pursuit of something, anything interesting. I took a few pictures with film camera, will see next week if anything worthy comes out.

Another no-resolution project I started this New Year is to organize, once again, my Lightroom library. I am pretty good with keywording, but sometimes they are too general, maybe just location and season for a whole card downloaded at one time into catalog. After watching a great tutorial on image tagging in Photosmith on your iPad in 2nd issue of “Extraordinary vision”, which gave me few ideas on keywording structure and remebering how easy it is to set it up in Lightroom (this post by Jeff Revell explains how to do organize LR keywords in text editor), my list is almost ready to be imported and used.

Now, I need to decide on, finally, single way to star and color-tag images, my old catalog is an awful combination of everything meaning nothing. But I think I am getting close, in my sketching the schemes on the piece of paper. In a sense, those flags, stars and color labels are personal, need to be adjusted to what is happening to the images- for example, I do not have clients. Most of images is to post on blog (which I want to have marked and/or stored in separate collection, so I don’t pick them again) and few images go to stock agencies, which I want to mark as picked to submit, submitted, approved etc.

With the tagging scheme done, I can finally take the full advantage of Gavin Gough’s simple workflow with the use of Smart Collections. When I first read about in his e-book, I was simply amazed by simplicity and practicality of his approach.

If you would like to learn more about using Lightroom to more efficiently organize and post-process your images, take a look at “The Photographer’s Workflow” by Gavin Gough. The e-book, with accopanied video tutorials and collection of presets for Library and Develop modules, is on sale for the whole month of January. Use the code “photowork33jan” at checkout to take advantage of the special price of $20.

Today’s image is a wolf from small zoo in the town of Baraboo, Wisconsin. The wolf is a male Arctic wolf/eastern timber wolf mix. Compare the mood in this image to yesterdays scene from my deck. There was movement and noise, and here is just calm and dignity of another beautiful animal.