I photographed two large sporting events over the last month. The combined photograph take turned out to be over 5,000 images. The reason for the large tally was my use of the Nikon D700 camera coupled with the MB-10 Battery Grip giving me the ability to fire off 9 frames per second (fps). Thus, many of the photos were bursts of 5 photos or more.
An Aperture 3 screen shot of some of the photos I am editing, processing and uploading for the NAMLA Championships.
Here is how I am handling this large amount of photos. The process is called a workflow and I am posting it for two reasons: To help others who find themselves overwhelmed with the task of managing large digital photography libraries and to ask you if you have any tips or suggestions on how I might be able to do this better. So, speak up! Please!
I use Apple’s Aperture 3 photo editing and management software on a MacBook Pro laptop. Adobe’s Lightroom is a similar package for Windows and OS/X systems.
1. It all starts with my Nikon D700 camera Picture Control settings. I use a setting which brings out very good skin tones and allows me to shoot in JPEG for People events.
2. When I ingest or import the photos on my computer using Aperture 3 into a new Project, I have an Import Pre-Set specifically for the Picture Control which adds some color vibrancy, a bit of contrast, auto-levels and sharpening. This gets the photos very close to being processed and saves me oodles of time. The pre-set adds generic captions, keywords, location, ownership and copyright to each photo’s metadata. Import Pre-sets are immensely useful and time saving.
3. After importing, I immediately backup the photos onto an external hard drive. Later, I will upload to a Smugmug.com gallery under my Backup category. I usually do that overnight.
4. For these sporting events, I then break out each game into a separate album within the overall project and, using Aperture 3’s batch processing, add more keywords like each team’s name and division. This further describes the photos making it easier for people searching on the Internet to find the photos.
5. Editing each photo is done in two passes. In the first pass I look for focus issues and composition. In a burst of photos, the camera may miss focus on the first one or two photos depending on the lens I use. When following a player or the action, I may not be aware of other players, referees, umpires or background elements in the frame which can ruin a photo. All those photos I mark rejected and later delete. On the second pass, I give a rating of 1 Star for the photos I feel are good enough to do final processing on.
6. Processing or finishing. I go through each 1 Star photo and really look at each one. If I still like it, I crop the photo and then do final adjustments. If I do not, I mark it rejected. You crop before adjustments so you only adjust what the final photo will look like. Adjustments I normally do is straightening, pulling back highlights, opening up shadows, add contrast and/or brightness. Each finished photo gets a 2 Star rating.
7. Once I finish up a game, I upload them to a gallery on Smugmug.com for viewing by the players, coaches and families where, if I have done my job right, they will purchase them.
Whew, that is a lot of work. Now, in a burst of photos, I will select just one or two of them which drastically reduces the number of photos I end up processing. Got all this? Good! I need to get back to work. Have another event this weekend.
Views Infinitum 
WOW..it sounds like you have all of your processing down to an art. Thanks for the info. on how you do it all, it will come in hand sometime when I am trying to get more organized.
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You’re welcome, Kat! As Plato said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” I had to come up with a way to produce quality work as quickly as I could.
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Thanks for the walk through of your workflow! I need to get more consistent with mine.
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When I have time and I am not nearly as rigid as this. I do follow a similar path will all my photo editing and management or I’d get lost.
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I too take a zillion photos and am trying to find a good method of weeding though them.
What I do… create a “global” folder and then make folders within those and folder within each set of those as well…
So: ” Netherlands” is one of the global folder – with 22 sub folders inside, one of which is “The Hague” – within that ,another 18 folders for various regions or things specific to the city, one of those is “Centre” (of The Hague) – which in turn contains 48 folders of specific places, buildings things of interest etc
I concentrate on weeding though the folders at the end of the line and quickly delete many of the pics that are not ok (out of focus etc) label the ones that are ok and then fine tune what’s left to make photos suitable for posting and photos are not (ie photos of my kids) these then get transfered into a seperate “kid “folder that I have ordered by year and month.
Celar as mud? It does at least give me an overview of the topics I photograph and roughly where I can find (most) things.
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There is no right or wrong answer here, KiwiDutch. I let Aperture manage my library and use projects, folders, albums and keywords within Aperture to organize the entire library. That way I keep the actual number of folders on the hard drive to a minimum.
Have you ever looked at using Lightroom (or Aperture if you are a Mac user)? .You should give the free trial a whirl.
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Scott, have you ever tried Auto-loader from Mike D.? What a wonderful time saver it is. I shot almost 1000 photos from a 5th grade end of the school year party for a client. I use pretty mush the same workflow as you do as far as rating and such. After I had finished my LR workflow, I would take the photos 1 by 1 to Photoshop to run a finishing action on them. That was time consuming to say the least.
then I learned of Auto-loader. I set up my starting action and ending action, placed all of the photos I needed to run those action on and ran Auto-loader. It opens the photos 1 at a time, run the actions and saves them to a separate folder. I actually ran through 997 photos in less than an hour, and all I had to do was push the F5 key once for each of them. Very cool time saver in my opinion!
http://www.photoshoptools.ca/autoloader/
Scott O’Neal
Bald Is Beautiful Photography
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Neat app, Scott. I do not use Photoshop but I bet some of my readers will be looking into using this.
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That’s great to read your workflow……I find it interesting to read how others do their workflow and see if I learn anything from their process. I am getting a new computer hopefully, this fall. I see you are using Aperture 3 instead of LR.
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Yes, I tried both Aperture and Lightroom out and found I like Aperture’s interface and way of working more to my liking. Both are excellent products which have made handling large digital photography projects and libraries so much easier. I do not know what I would do without it.
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Thanks, I use Aperture and am still working on my workflow. Lots of good hints here!
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Glad I could give you some ideas, Lori! Thank you for your comment.
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Thanks Scott for the great tips. I don’t have a very good system and this method will work great for me.
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