The ideal post-photographic workflow

Photography

10/21/2023

Who is not familiar with this situation: in different cloud or local storages you have photos taken with family members' cell phones, or with your own, and on top of that maybe with the digital SLR camera on special occasions.

The key question is: how do you keep track of, and merge them all into a central archive, for editing, systematic retrieval, or for safe storage for many years ahead?

I want to share with you my approach to building and maintaining a sustainable system for editing, retrieving, and archiving pictures.

Let's be clear: the time required to get started can be considerable, and a software license to manage photos is not always free of charge.

But once you have filled the system with life then it can give you, your family, and friends a lot of pleasure. More importantly, it encourages you to put more effort into taking pictures and doing so more often. You gradually start to observe your environment more closely, and consciously recognize the beauty in people, situations, and objects.

My preferred software for this is the Adobe suite, in particular Lightroom and Photoshop, although the latter tends to take a back seat in terms of frequency of use. Lightroom offers a rich collection of editing tools, even masking and AI-based detection of subjects (including people). Thereby you can selectively e.g. lighten up darkened objects while leaving the perfectly lighted areas untouched.

Where Lightroom allows handling large collections of photos with reusable profiles, Photoshop is the preferred tool to apply the final finish prior to printing or publishing.

Here are the steps involved that I found suitable for me as a dedicated hobby photographer:

1.) Locate all picture sources

There are possibly multiple sources, often spread among various locations. It could be the photo archive in your Google, Microsoft OneDrive, or iTunes account. You could scan your local hard drives or SSDs for files in JPG or PNG format. Even old Emails sent with a picture attachment might reveal forgotten photos of value.

2.) Place them in Lightroom

First, you need to decide what photo repository and editing tool you want to use.

Adobe offers two alternatives for this purpose. Either a standalone Lightroom license for 11,89 €/month without Cloud storage or a combined Lightroom and Photoshop license for 23,79 €/month with 1 Terabyte of Cloud storage. I use the latter (it is also called “Creative Cloud Foto with 1 TB”). The quota of 1TB translates to appr. 20.000 images in RAW format and 200.000 JPG images.

It is possible to either work from a local disk or from the Cloud with Lightroom, or both with synchronization. I prefer working with “Lightroom” which is the Cloud version.

It is helpful to group photos in albums. These are virtual baskets that typically constitute one main event, where you upload all pics from – say - the wedding anniversary to Lightroom.

The best way to name albums I found is to follow this structure:

Album name: yyyy-mm description, for example, “2019-10 Wedding Anniversary Dinner”

3.) Apply tags and a rating to each pic

The real value of a picture archive (or better “repository” because the data is continually updated) can be drawn from the possibility of managing metadata. There are two types of metadata. Those that are automatically collected by the camera the moment you take a photo (in EXIF format), and information that you insert manually. The latter include tags like “garden”, “cocktail”, “sunset” etc.

To later order or extract the pics according to their quality or importance you can add stars to them (from 1 to 5), and whether you want to include or exclude them. (The advice is to not throw away photos prematurely because a hazy or unsharp image could be recovered with the advent of new image editing technology in the future.)

One of the really cool features is the possibility to use face recognition. You can literally watch how the software, after initial manual input of names to a couple of photos, begins to learn and automatically tag other photos with the correct name (sometimes you have to correct them).

Once you have accomplished the hard work of applying meta tags, ratings, and names it is a pleasure to display a set of images according to your criteria (or of someone else’s) on a mouse click.

4.) Edit pics to enhance quality

Sometimes a person is visible only in a shade and is much darker than the surrounding landscape. With Lightroom, it is possible to have it detect the person automatically and apply a mask on it for lightning the appearance of only this section of the image.

Moreover, by using Curves within masking, it is possible to have precise control over tonality and colour in specific regions (e.g. person) of a photo.

In the latest versions of Lightroom noise can be removed automatically from the image. Previously it had to be done in multiple manual steps, but this has been approved by machine learning.

Whenever I learn new editing features of Lightroom I revisit some valuable photos with mediocre image quality to apply the new tools. Thereby I might be able to increase the rating. Hence, steps 3 and 4 are part of an iterative process.

5.) Backup and export

We should always strive to maintain at least one backup version of any valuable data (pictures, documents, etc.) and keep it recent. Data loss or corruption of data happens more often than we think. Besides, in case you decide to cancel the subscription with Adobe you do not have to “hurry” to migrate the pics elsewhere, because you have them already neatly stored externally.

Within Lightroom, it is possible to primarily use a local disk or a Cloud version of the repository. The backup can be accomplished to make an “and” out of the “or”, within Lightroom itself either by a setting or by means of the export function. With the setting option in place, it will dynamically update the copy, with the export option obviously it won’t.

It is important to understand the basic rendering principle of Adobe Lightroom: the changes you apply through editing do not alter the underlying original image (it's called "non-destructive")!

Therefore you are always dealing with two data sets: one is the totality of original images with accompanying metadata reflecting the changes you have applied to them, and the other dataset contains the rendered images (usually in JPG format).

Therefore, remember – before distributing your rendered images to friends or family members – that you must export them from Lightroom (either directly or via Photoshop)!

Conclusion: adopting a systematic post-photographic workflow brings the joy of easy filtering and the display of edited pictures within one environment only, thereby providing a coherent and sustainable repository with the ease of integrating new photos immediately after they were taken.

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