Thanks a lot to all who responded on and off the list.
I hope it was clear that my statement in the subject was a bit facetious.
I like digital photography (and the camera I currently have, k-5 IIs),
It enabled many things that were unavailable (that easily) to me during
the film era. But some aspects of it bring up the issues described in the
original message.
I appreciate many different thoughts and suggestions. Some (many) of those
I've been using for long time. But a few suggestions helped me in
improving my work flow. In particular, the idea of rating the image with
1-5 stars is helpful. In most cases, I was just sorting them out with
select/reject flags. THe downside of those in insufficient granularity,
and the fact that those are "local variable", i.e. they apply only to the
particular collection and do not show in a different collection if the
photo is included in more than one collection, or even in the original
folder.
In the past week, I've adopted the following star rating:
1 star - bad, can be deleted. (but I keep the original on the HDD)
2 stars - barely OK , will not be used for the project, but I might
go back to that if I need a snapshot of something/somebody.
3 stars - OK for the project, and might be included in the final set
(depending on the project), if I don't have all that I need in 4+
-starred photos.
4 stars - photos will be in the final set for the project (unless
a duplicate for another 4+ star photo)
5 stars - 4 stars plus a possible value for other projects (e.g. overall
great photograph that I might print or work more on in the future).
Absence of a star rating is not a bad thing, but just the fact that the
file hasn't been rated (or hasn't been rated yet.)
I don't have philosophical issues with the "stars" (or quasars), and
I consider the ratings system described above somewhat similar to
Yelp star rating, where "1" means "awful", and "2" means "bad".
That's a very typical system for many evaluations on the 1-5 scale (very
bad, bad, neutral, good, very good).
As you can see these ratings are project-oriented but with the idea
of keeping these ratings uniform across projects so that I can go back
and find the best photos in the older projects for a new project.
E.g. when I need to do a slide show on a particular topic, I can quickly
choose photos from several different past projects (e.g. events) that
are alread rated at 5, or sometimes 4.
Let me share back some of my organizational practices (in case they
would be useful to others):
I do use the colors for some specific purposes, but those are usually
inconsistent, and not used too frequently.
My folders on the HDD are already sorted by years and (most of the time)
for separate events. I use "collections" for two main purposes:
1. to select photos for a specific project (or event) and to prepare
web-galleries.
Occasionally, for some special projects, I create a separate catalog
(either from the beginning, from the moment of importing photos into LR,
or later on, by exporting some collections as a catalog).
One of my concerns is that as the main catalog grows, at some point
it contributes to some slugishness. So, I've been considering starting
a new "main" catalog, but I haven't decided on that. I might do that
at the point of installing the new version of LR.
I am also considering adopting something similar to what Larry described
with respect to the catalogs.
As for committments, - I am avoiding those. Bbut even when there is no
formal committment, after shooting at some event (e.g. scientific
conference) I've had people asking and reminding me that some
photos haven't been posted every time they see me.
And, occasionally, I either agree to provide photos, or feel that doing
that would be benefitial professionally [in my day job], frequently for
networking purposes. I am sure some of PDMLers are familiar with such
situations.
Attila: I don't start processing photos until the photographs are
completely imported (and the previews are generated), as otherwise, the
computer are too sluggish. Other people on the list have written here
about the same experience previously. Often, after a coming back from a
trip with many photos, I set up the import before going to bed, and let it
running for several hours. THe inconvenience of that is that
you cannot queue tasks in LR (at least in LR 3.x and 4.x, don't know
about 5.x). LR always runs the jobs in parallel, and if those jobs are
similar in nature (different imports or generation of different
web-galleries), it's inefficient, and occasionally LR gets stuck.
Again, thanks to all for the thoughtful discussion and helpful ideas!
Igor
On Mon, 22 Sep 2014, Igor PDML-StR wrote:
Yes, I hate digital photography!
With a digital camera, I am producing to many photographs to be able to
deal with.
Even though I take photographs only a few days a month, they come in "bursts"
of several hundreds, and then I don't have time to select and process them.
Back in the earlier film era (20+ years), when I was shooting B&W, I had a
similar situation with a backlog (but on a different scale), - since I was
developing and printing myself. So, I switched to slides - I was getting the
film developed at a shop.
(Then, when minilabs became accessible for me, I started doing color prints,
- as it was easy to take the film and get the prints.)
Now, I feel myself in some way similarly to the situation I had
20-some years ago (albeit on a different level of everything), -
swamped with the amount of photographs taken and not having enough time
to process them.
Do they have a treatment for photogolism?
I wonder how other people on the list deal with the photos they take,
especially those who take many photos.
Regards,
Igor
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