I do photography as a side job. 100% self taught, and I think my lack of education when it comes to photo organization is going to catch up to me.

My current process is:

  • Back up photos on hard drive

  • Cull photos on my Mac by “tagging” them, and moving the tagged photos to Lightroom

  • Move them to the appropriate file in Lightroom. Photos are organized by subject > year > name/date. This also serves as a backup.

  • When I send photos to clients, I copy the photos to a floating file on my desktop and share them on a Google drive file. I do this because it (was) free and easy, except now I’m paying 9.99 a month for for more storage

This doesn’t seem like an ideal process to me. I don’t know what I don’t even know. Does anyone have a streamlined process they want to brag about?

  • ejp1082@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure I even follow your process. But -

    1. I use Lightroom for everything. Stick the card in the computer. Import with Lightroom. It’ll copy the photos to the right folders, organized by date.
    2. Backups run automatically either on a schedule (for my local backup) or when they detect changes on the drive (for my cloud backup - Backblaze).
    3. Go through the photos, flag the ones I want to work on
    4. Work on the photos
    5. Give the photos I’ve worked on a star rating once I’m done and add to relevant collections (For a project, a trip, strictly personal photo, shareable photos, etc)
    6. Add keywords to all the photos I’ve given a rating to - genre, subject, location, people in the photo, etc.

    On an organizational level that’s pretty much it. In Lightroom I can then search and sort by date, metadata, keywords, etc as desired.

    I export to JPG as needed and in my case share with dropbox, though google drive would work just as well.