In continuation from last post…
OK, now when I get home with all the pictures that I took what do I do with them? This is the same for a long trip with gigabytes worth of images or an afternoon walk with a handful of pictures. I do the same procedure regardless of the number of images. In this case I plugged my external hard drive that I had with me In Maui into my desktop computer. If I only had a CF card or two filled I would insert each card individually and import the images from them.
I use Adobe Lightroom for all my image handling. So I open Lightroom and go to the Library page and click Import. This brings up a dialogue box with a few options that you can choose. First I select that I want Lightroom to import a copy of the files. Again just incase something were to go wrong I still would have a copy on my portable hard drive/CF card. I like to import and organize my photos by date, so I have that selected as how I want them organized upon import. The next thing is where do I want them imported to? I have two external hard drives that I keep all my photos on. I select my main drive to import to. One of the best things about importing you photos with Lightroom is that you can select to have a backup copy of your images also imported to another location. As you can tell I am a big fan of having copies of everything. I once had a hard drive fail on me and if I didn’t have a backup, every picture I had taken up to that point would have been lost. So back up, back up, back up. Like I was saying I have two hard drives that all they have on them is my photos. Each drive is an exact copy of the other but I only work out of one. The other one is turned off and only gets used for backing up.
Next big thing it Keywords. This is another great thing about Lightoom. You can add keywords to your photos. Great when you have 30,000 or so photos and you want to find that one photo of a “bridge” on the “Mississippi river” in “Hastings” Helps narrow it down for you so you don’t have to try and remember where you put those shots. When I am importing photos like this last vacation with multiple days and multiple things photographed I like to keep the keywords pretty vague. You can go back and add more keywords later. So every photo imported this time got “Hawaii”, “Maui” and Vacation” as keyword’s. Next I will import my photos and let Lightroom do its thing. Depending on how many images your importing this could take awhile. I started importing and went and did something else.
Now that I have all my photos on my computer the next thing I will do it to quickly go through and make sure everything looks correct. No missing photos or things like that. I never have had a problem but don’t hurt to check. This next step can be a pain. Rating. I like to rate my photos. Helps me when I want to sit down and work on images. Lightroom has several different ways you can do this. I use the stars. They have 0-5 star rating system. The way that I use them and this might not be how anyone else would do it but it works for me. I have one, two and three star images after import. I also will delete anything that is obviously out of focus or those random pictures of the inside of your lens cap or the ceiling. Otherwise its 1, 2 or 3. I go through them very quickly and don’t spend much time looking at each image. One stars are the one’s that are obviously not very good but you don’t want to delete. My one stars could probably get delegated and I would never miss them but memory is cheap these days and if you rate your photos you can just not select one star images when you go to view your photos. Next are two stars. These are ones that might look a bit soft or the composition is off or what ever. Like I said I go through them quickly. You can always change things later. Than there are the three star’s. These are the ones that jump out at me as being a good photo or ones that have the most potential. I do use the four and five stars.
If I work on a photo I will give it a rating of four stars. So If I work on the raw image in Lightroom or work on a copy of the image in Photoshop I will give it four stars. If I print an image it will get five stars. More on this later. By this point my hands were all cramped and tired from going through almost 3000 images and giving them a rating. Its time for a beer!
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