workflow and file management (systems and processes)

Managing your workflow and file system is an incredibly important, but usually overlooked, part of being a photographer. I have learnt from experience that to not look after your file systems properly can cause untold amounts of stress, theres nothing like that feeling of 'I CANT FIND MY PHOTOS!!' to make you appreciate proper filing of your work.

I do a lot of photoshoots outside of college and have implemented my own filing and workflow systems that work well for me.



this is an example of my file hierarchy, you can see-circled in red on the left-my parent folders are named for the type of shoot that they are-clients, weddings, events etc. and that the main window shows the named folders for each shoot. If i was to do a shoot for a client more than once, they would be located in the named folder under the date or theme of that shoot. Its very simple, easy to navigate and works well for me.

I also have a copy of this entire file system on my external hard drive for backup purposes.


With regards to workflow management in Lightroom, my process goes like this:

Open Lightroom
Go to File -> Import photos from disk (or device if you are importing directly from your camera or memory card) and locate the files you want to open

you can press ctrl + A to select all the files in the folder if you wish to import all of them.
Next, the import dialogue box for Lightroom comes up, adjust the settings on the box as you wish (for me, its just 'add photos to catalogue without moving' as i have already copied my files onto my harddrive directly from my memory card)

The files are then imported into lightroom where you can select the images you want to work on (i use shortcut ctrl + ^ to flag the photos i wish to edit, and then click 'custom filter -> flagged' to show just the chosen flagged images to work on), edit them accordingly and export them as required.

You can also add captions for photographs which, when the photos are uploaded to image sharing sites such as Flickr.com, the caption will show up under the 'description' field on your photograph.

here you can see, in the 'library' module the option to enter a caption circled in red. On this photograph, i have entered the name of the model and the shoot theme.

When it comes to exporting your images, there are many different options for doing so. I personally use 3 different presets for exporting.
1) exporting for web/facebook. The image is resized to 1000px on the longest side, a small watermark with my website details is added, sharpening for screen is selected and the image resolution is 72dpi. The image is automatically saved as a JPEG into a folder located with the original RAW files called 'Web'
2) exporting for client printing. The image is kept at the original size, no watermark is added, sharpening for matt paper is selected and the image resolution is 300dpi. The images is automatically saved as a JPEG into a folder named 'Client Print' , ready to be burned to a disc to give to my client or my model.
3) exporting for archive. The image is kept at original size, no watermark is added, no sharpening is applied (as i prefer to use the unsharp mask in photoshop for my own prints) and the image resolution is 300dpi. The image is saved as an 8bit TIFF file (to avoid compression) and stored in a folder named 'archive'

below is an example of the export dialogue box for lightroom.

You can see the options for export location, file naming ( i like to name my files after the name of the client, shoot theme and date) and the file settings. You can also see the presets for export at the left, including my own presets for export.