Counting sheep-keeping track of your images

Kia ora tatou:

Workflow. If you read digital photography sites, you will find it mentioned often. If you are experienced, you will know what it means. Everybody has their own ideas of how to go about it, and their own way of doing it. An explanation is in order.

With digital photography, you will almost certainly end up shooting a lot of images. Keeping track of them, keeping them protected and being able to retrieve them at a later date is critical. Unlike film, digital images can get lost, corrupted or be hard to track down later on. You need to develop a system that makes sense to you and one that ensures you can get to image X quickly and efficiently. This is known as workflow, and it requires a certain amount of discipline.

So here is a suggested way of going about it. This is the method I use and it works for me. Feel free to develop your own system.

1. Let’s begin with the camera. Format your card regularly. You might be interested to know that deleting doesn’t actually get rid of the file. It only removes the header tags. Provided you haven’t written over it, you can recover an accidentally deleted file with an application like Image Rescue. Formatting means you scrub the card clean ready for new images to be added. Some people format every time they shoot. I do- but only after all the images have been safely archived!
2. Coming in from a shoot, I will download the images to my hard drive, storing them into a suitably-named folder.
3. I will then examine them in a program like Adobe Bridge or Picasa. Any obvious duds, like accidental shots of my foot get deleted.
4. I will then batch rename the files, again using Bridge. I have evolved my own system of renaming that includes location or job, shoot date and finally the sequence number. So a file like X10E6157.CR2 becomes Backlit sheep_21082006_325.CR2. Retrieval then becomes a snip-usually.
5. I then add in my Copyright and contact details to the file metadata. If you have Bridge, this is relatively easy. Other apps allow this as well.
6. The next step is to archive. Since my cameras produce big files (and I have an eager shutter finger), I burn to good-quality DVD. 2 copies. Note: I have resisted the temptation to open and fiddle with any images. This is especially important if you are shooting jpegs. You want the archived files to be as pristine as possible. I use a CD marker pen to label each of the DVD’s. Each is labelled something like this: Backlit sheep Waihora 210806 1/2 or 2/2. The 1/2 label tells me that it is disc 1 of 2.
7. I then backup the data to a removable hard drive. My PC is fitted with a removable hard drive bay. The drives come in cassettes that slot into the bay. Insert, reboot and archive.
8. Both discs and drive are then stored in a fireproof safe.

Now I can play!

Oh yes, I absolutely did NOT shoot the image at the top of this post!

Ka kite ano