On Oct 25, 2006, at 6:34 AM, Jaume Lahuerta wrote: >> - I've learned a lot in the past year about how to go about sorting >> and selecting work, using the tools to my advantage. The difference >> is dramatic enough that I'm going to reorganize my 2005 photo library >> and set it up to go through again like I'm doing now with the 2006 >> work. > > A little elaboration on this would be greatly appreciated.
Ok: For last year's trip, my photos were just downloaded into folders that were date.session coded ... 20050601.1 20050601.2 20050602.1 etc, as they went into the Epson 2000. The problem with this as it comes to sorting is that actual "shoots" or sessions are often broken up into several folders and one of the technical limitations of Bridge is that it is only able to show me the contents of a single folder per window at a time. It makes it hard to look at a group of photos from an event or theme basis, and as a result I spend a lot of time going back and forth between folders missing exposures that pose an opportunity. This year, since I had my laptop with me, after each shoot I downloaded all of the exposures, no matter how many different cards I might have used, into a single folder notated by "date - <tag>" ... eg: 20060928 - Summerland Memorial 20060928 - Curraghs walk 20060929 - house and kitchen implements 20060929 - douglas promenade and so on. The tags provide an event context for a group of photos, which makes sorting through them folder by folder and setting a rating much faster since I don't swap between folders very often. It's a simple thing, something which I hadn't done with the 2005 photos, but I find it easier to work with the event theme providing context for my first level rankings. Once I've got the first pass ratings in place, I can restrict the view of a given set to just photos that have a rating. At that point, if I have some notions of content driven thema that isn't tied to the event context, I can create an archive on the content them with iView MediaPro and walk through the photos, dragging the ones that suit the content theme into the iView archive window directly. It doesn't move the files, just puts a path and a thumbnail there. I can save these archives independent of the file structure of where I have the photos stored. Again, i simply hadn't thought to do it quite this way before. All of a sudden I've discovered I've come up with the "Shoots" and "Collections" organization that Lightroom has as its embedded Library notions, where "Shoots" contain the unique, actual exposures and "Collections" has alternative groupings of the image files. I'd done something similar to this along the course of the year but it finally clicked that I could cover a lot more ground and do it more easily if I formalized this way of working. I've been working with Lightroom's latest beta since yesterday and finding that this way of rating and grouping is moving me through the work very very much faster than previous methodologies. For some who have been doing this kind of editing longer than I, it is quite likely that what I'm coming to here is old hat, something they've been doing for a long time, I'm sure. It's a small thing in actual operations, it's a big thing in conceptual mindset to me. It will take a little time but I'm going to go through my 2005 IoM exposures and reorganize the folders with the "date-<tag>" structure as I have all my written notes on the events by date. Many of the exposures have already been rated so I use that as a starting point to re-assess what is worth moving forward on, what new groupings make sense, etc. Whether I drop everything into Lightroom or continue to use Bridge and iView as my working tools depends on how much more I uncover about how to use Lightroom as part of the total workflow effectively. There is much about it as yet that i am not sure of, but it's looking better to me now than it did just a month ago. Little epiphanies matter. ;-) Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
