Building a Post-Processing Workflow
You’ve just taken your camera out for a photo walk, and you managed to capture some images you like. Now what? The next step is getting the images you’ve taken off of the memory card. In this article, I’m going to talk through how best to transfer images, keep everything organized, and create a post-processing workflow for maximum efficiency with minimal effort.
If you haven’t thought much about your workflow, it is probably quite haphazard and inconsistent. You might transfer images from your camera in a different way each time. The images may end up in random folders on your computer, and you might struggle to find the right image to edit or share. If you are using a program like Lightroom, you might have a mess of catalogs.
When it is just a couple of images, this doesn’t matter too much, but the more you shoot, the more being organized and consistent improves your life. Having a consistent, repeatable workflow helps reduce the time you spend in front of the computer, which frees you up for other tasks, like shooting. It also makes a difference when you need to find a photo to share years later.
So with that, let’s dive in and understand what makes up a good workflow and how you can build one to suit you.
Workflow steps
Every workflow has the same core steps. I’ll explore them in detail below, but I want to introduce them up-front so you can think about them:
Capture (taking the picture)
Transfer (getting the picture onto your computer)
Import (getting the picture into Lightroom or your digital asset management tool of choice)
Selecting (choosing with pictures to process)
Development (post-processing the picture)
Metadata management (adding metadata to the picture)
Export (saving the picture to disk and sharing)
Archive (moving the picture to long-term storage)
As we explore the steps, keep in mind that the workflow you use is personal to you. You are welcome to take what I’m doing as a baseline, but everybody tweaks their workflow to suit their needs, and you should feel free to do that too.
Capture and Transfer
Image capture is the fun part and the reason I think most of us pick up a camera. I’m not going to talk about it here, except to say that some cameras support the ability to write files into a separate folder on the card or with a different filename. I don’t generally use these features but you may want to experiment to see if they work for you.
Transferring images is the process of getting images off of your card and onto your computer. There are two ways to do this, either by removing the card from your camera and inserting it into a card reader on your computer, or by connecting your camera directly to the computer via a USB cable or similar. By far, removing the card and doing the transfer directly has proven to be faster for me. With the exception of the very newest cameras, most cameras don’t support the latest USB standards and that can reduce transfer speeds. Having a card reader is also useful when you have multiple cards to import, since you can just stick them into the computer instead of first swapping them into the camera.
Where you place your images on disk matters. All of the photos I import go into the same folder, aptly named “Photos”. Each photo shoot gets its own folder within “Photos”, which is named as follows:
2019-12-10 Title of Shoot
If a shoot spans multiple days, I’ll usually just place all of the images in the same folder named for the first day of the shoot. Very occasionally, for large and complex shoots, I’ll keep things separated by day, or do some other type of organization like subfolders under the main one, but the cardinal rule is that everything for that shoot lives under that folder.
I use Lightroom to do the transfer and import steps from the card in one shot. I have Lightroom set up to automatically create the date folder – check out the settings in the Destination pane when you bring up the Import dialog for the various options. Lightroom can also rename your files at import, build previews, or apply basic development settings, but I usually don’t use any of these things.
Import
Importing is the process of getting your images into your digital asset management tool of choice. I use Lightroom so that’s what I’ll describe here. Other digital asset management software will have similar steps.
Another popular choice is to skip the digital asset manager and use software like Adobe Bridge to perform raw conversion and other tasks. I have not found this approach to work for me, as I like the convenience that Lightroom provides. But, that’s why workflows are tailored to each person.
As I mentioned, I let Lightroom handle transfer and import for me. When that’s done, I end up with a folder named something like this:
Photos\2019-12-10
The first step is to rename the folder to include the shoot name. You can do that by right clicking the folder in Lightroom and choosing Rename:
Photos\2019-12-10 Mt. Awesome
The next step is to create a collection and collection set for the shoot. A collection is Lightroom’s method of grouping related photos together. A collection can live underneath a collection set. Using these tools, you can organize your photos without moving them around on disk.
I have two top-level collection sets in every catalog:
AA To Process
ZZ Published
As you might imagine, the first one is my “to do” list, and the second one is my “done” list. The AA and ZZ are there because Lightroom shows collections and collection sets in alphabetical order, and I always want these to be at the top and bottom of the list of collections. You can make a collection set by clicking the small + icon next to the Collections pane.
A new photo shoot is definitely in the “to do” bucket, so I start by making a new collection set under AA To Process with the name of the folder. The easiest way to do this is:
In the Folders pane, right click the imported folder name and choose “Rename”.
Copy the folder name and close the dialog without renaming it.
Right click AA To Process and choose Create Collection Set.
Paste the name that was copied from the clipboard.
You should now have this:
AA To Process
2019-12-10 Mt. Awesome
ZZ Published
The last step is to create a collection with all of the photos from the shoot in it. I name this “All”. To do this:
Click on the imported folder in the Folders pane.
Press Cmd+A (Mac) or Ctrl+A (PC) to select all of the files. Leave this view visible while you perform the next few steps.
Right click on the collection set for your shoot (e.g. 2019-12-10 Mt. Awesome).
Choose Create Collection.
Make sure the dialog has these settings:
Name: All
Inside a Collection Set: Checked and showing 2019-12-10 Mt. Awesome
Include Selected Photos: Checked
Other checkboxes: unchecked
Click Create.
Make sure you have the same number of photos in the All collection that you do in the folder. If not, or you forgot to check the Include Selected Photos setting, simply go back to the imported folder, press Cmd+A or Ctrl+A to select all the files, and drag them into your All collection.
Selecting
Selecting is the process of culling photos and picking your best work to post-process. Chances are that not all of the images from your shoot are keepers, so you’ll need to pick the best ones to work on and share.
There are about as many ways to select and cull images as there are photographers. I’m going to present what works for me, along with another method that I see a lot of folks doing. Try both and see if you like one over the other, or if you like something entirely different.
Here’s how I do it:
Click on the All collection for the shoot, select the first photo, and press E to enter Loupe view.
Decide if the photo meets my minimum bar for consideration. At this stage, I’m mainly looking to exclude photos for technical deficiencies, like being out of focus, out of exposure, and such, but sometimes I also just hate a photo so will exclude it for that reason.
If I want to keep the photo, I press the P key on my keyboard to flag it as a Pick. The photo gets a little white flag in the filmstrip view. If you make a mistake, you can press U to unpick the photo.
Press the right arrow key to move to the next photo.
Repeat steps 2 through 4 until all photos are evaluated. Normally, I do this quite quickly for the first pass.
Once done with the last photo, press G to return to Grid view.
Press Cmd+D or Ctrl+D to deselect any photo.
Press Cmd+Option+A or Ctrl+Option+A to select only the photos I’ve picked. You can also do this with Edit -> Select Flagged Photos.
With that selection, right click the Collection Set (2019-12-20 Mt. Awesome) and create a new collection named “Best”. Be sure that “Include selected photos” is checked.
Click on the Best collection and press Cmd+A or Ctrl+A to select all photos.
Press U to unflag all photos.
Now, I repeat this process again, this time starting with “Best” instead of “All”. On the next pass, I’m raising the bar on what I pick. On the first pass if it’s in focus I might pick it, but on the second pass I’m looking for good light, compelling composition, and so forth. When I’m done with that, I create a new collection named “Best 2”. I continue repeating this process, creating collections named “Best 3”, “Best 4”, etc. until I have arrived at what I think is the best set of photos from the shoot.
This process only works if you get more hardcore about what you are picking each time. Sometimes the cuts are hard, but the good news is that if you change your mind you have a trail of collections you can go back to and reconsider if need be.
An alternate way to do this that some people prefer us to use the star ratings that Lightroom offers. You can the 1 through 5 keys on your keyboard to assign between 1 and 5 stars to an image. The usual process is to first make 1 star selections, then 2 star, then 3, and so forth. These roughly map to my Best, Best 2, etc. collections above.
Some people like to delete photos at this stage as well. In addition to pressing P to pick a photo, you can also press X to reject it. You could then select all the rejects and delete them from disk. I personally don’t do this as disk space is cheap and I prefer to keep everything.
Whatever process you use, the outcome of this step is that you have a collection of images that you are ready to work on.
Development
Up until now, the workflow process has been mostly mechanical and not very creative. Developing images is the next chance to be creative with your images.
I’m not going to talk about how to develop images in Lightroom here. Perhaps a topic for a future article, but I also cover this topic specifically for Milky Way images in another article as well as in my book.
Once an image is developed, I have one more workflow step I apply, which is to add the image to another collection under the set for the shoot named ZZ To Pub. Create the collection if it doesn’t exist, and drag the photo there. This collection contains all of my finished images and is where I begin the final workflow steps. The name for me is something of a habit – I used to also have a collection named ZZZ Published (with an extra Z to force ordering) but stopped doing that once I changed how I was sharing and publishing images.
Sometimes I also have other collections for finished photos. If I have a shoot where some, but not all, images will make it to my stock catalog, I might make a ZZ To Stock collection for only the images that are going to stock. Or, if I have some images that I only want to share with my family but not the public, I’ll make a ZZ To Fam. Feel free to organize in a way that makes sense for you.
Metadata Management
Once images are completed and in the ZZ To Pub collection, it’s time to apply metadata to them. For me, this metadata always includes:
Title
Caption
Keywords
Over the years, I have optimized this process around having good metadata for my stock catalog. Stock tends to be the most demanding in terms of what metadata I actually need. For scenarios like sharing to social media, I’m usually going to rewrite the title and caption anyhow to be clever or funny, but that’s not too useful in a stock catalog.
I’ve settled on the following format for image titles:
Major Location, Minor Location – Description of image
These components require some explanation. As I’ll talk about below, when I export images for my stock catalog, I group them by location. This works for me because I am primarily a landscape shooter and the location is often the most important thing to organize by. I try to keep the folders describing my locations as general as possible, adding specificity over time as I accumulate more images. For instance, I have a folder named “Montana” because I haven’t shot enough images there to warrant any sub folders, but at the same time I have a folder named “Washington” with lots of subfolders for geographic areas like “North Cascades”, “Rainier”, “Olympic”, “Puget Sound”, and so forth.
It’s in this context that I’m describing the major and minor location of the image. What I pick for the major location depends on where it was shot. For a large geographic area like the North Cascades, it is often the county the image was shot in, or in a few cases the name of the trailhead that the hike is accessed from (especially if there are multiple hikes in the same area). The minor location is usually the name of the hike, mountain, or landscape feature. If you want to get a sense of how this works in practice, take a look at my stock library (the Stock link on the top navigation). The image titles retain this format and broadly the collections you see there mirror what I have on my hard disk in my office.
The description of the image also requires a little explanation. Over time, I’ve settled on using a literal description of what’s going on in the image, so something like “Man in dinosaur costume with ironing board at top of mountain” as opposed to something clever like “Welcome to Jurassic Park.” This helps massively with finding an image, either by browsing or keywording.
I am currently not using image captions. At one point I was putting the location of the image in the caption, but that moved to the title. Then I was putting a few sentences about the location in the caption, but that became too time consuming. So for now I’m leaving it blank.
Last is keywording. I think everyone will agree that keywording sucks, but keywording sucks a whole lot less if you just do it whenever you produce a batch of images. I have been guilty of having massive keywording backlogs and it is completely terrible to sit and keyword several years’ worth of shoots, but going through that gives you extra motivation to do it when you post-process the image.
There are two main motivations for keywording. The first is for stock, especially if you are doing micro stock and expect people to be able to find your images. Even if you aren’t doing micro stock and are just hosting your images on Smugmug or Photoshelter or similar, having good keywords helps your visitors find what they are looking for. The second reason to do keywords is for yourself. I’ve been pretty meticulous about tagging night sky images with “astro” or forest images with “tree” so now I can pull up anything really quickly with just a few keystrokes. It massively helps with a large library when trying to pull images for social media, your web site, or anything else.
For keywords, I try to stick to some basics. I always describe what’s in the image – trees, mountains, etc. If it’s sunset or sunrise, I’ll say that. If it’s a night sky image, I’ll say that, and usually add more specifics. I’ll also add keywords for the location, both broad and specific. Sometimes I’ll also add conceptual keywords, describing the mood or feeling of a photo, or if the image represents any concepts like teamwork or something along those lines. I am for between 10 and 20 keywords per image, but sometimes I fall outside that range.
Note that Lightroom has a bulk keywording tool – just select multiple images and start adding keywords to apply them to all selected images. I’ve found this is a really helpful way to get things like the location keywords on all your images really quickly.
Export
Now that images are finished and tagged with metadata, it’s time to export them. This is where I transition from managing images in Lightroom to placing images in specific folders on disk. Folders on disk are more stable long-term if I move computers or decide to stop using Lightroom.
I use Lightroom’s export presets to manage how my images are exported. I export at least four copies of every image I shoot to disk:
Web-quality JPEG, with a watermark. This is intended for sharing on social media:
JPEG format
98 quality
sRGB color space
Max size on long edge 2048 pixels
72 dpi
Sharpening for screen at standard settings
All IPTC and EXIF data stripped except for copyright
Watermark attached. I have several templates for different positions of my watermark that I can pick from.
Promotional JPEG, with no watermark. These are intended for use on my web site, in emails, and so forth.
Same settings as web-quality JPEG, but without the watermark
High-quality JPEG. These are intended for printing:
JPEG format
100 quality
ProPhoto RGB color space
No resizing or size limits
300 dpi
No sharpening
All IPTC and EXIF metadata included
No watermark
Archival TIFF. This is the highest quality, largest size image I export intended for long-term storage and conversion to future formats. I also sometimes print from these.
TIFF format with ZIP compression
ProPhoto RGB color space
16 bit depth
No resizing or size limits
300 dpi
No sharpening
All IPTC and EXIF metadata included
No watermark
Although some of this may look redundant, I’ve found over time that having these formats is really useful since I can just grab an image and use it without having to go back into Lightroom to modify it.
I encourage you to experiment with these settings for your needs. For instance, I recently added the promotional JPEG export type after being frustrated by slow uploads of high-quality JPEG images to my web site. My web site host downsamples the images anyways, so there was no need to send such a large image. Out of that problem I made that new export.
All of my exports go into different folders on disk. I have a folder called “Finished Photos” that lives in my OneDrive, and some of the output of each photo shoot lives under there. In the example I provided above, I’d have a folder like:
Finished Photos\2019-12-10 Mt. Awesome
Underneath that folder, I’ll create two folders:
Web, for web-quality JPEGs
Hq, for high-quality JPEGs
My promotional JPEGs all go into one folder in my OneDrive named “Stock Promo”. I’ve found this is useful for how I manage stock (which I’ll talk about a little below). You might find it better to stick these under the shoot folder for each shoot, maybe in a “Webpromo” folder or something.
Finally, my stock images go into a different folder grouped by location. I talked a little about this above, but I have a folder in my OneDrive named “Stock” and subfolders under that by location. Each archival TIFF then goes into the correct location folder. The outcome is that I can browse my disk and see everything I’ve shot at Mt. Rainier or similar across multiple shoots.
Archive
The last step in my workflow is archiving images. There are two steps.
The first is disk space conservation. I have a relatively small SSD on my laptop, and can’t fit everything there. So, after I finish editing a shoot, I will move the folder of the original raws to external storage. This is a couple of steps in Lightroom:
Move the shoot collection to the ZZ Published top-level collection set.
Move the folder in Lightroom from my local disk to an external disk. Doing this in Lightroom is essential as it allows Lightroom to keep track of the new location. If you can’t see your external disk, you can solve that problem by creating a folder there with a single random image and importing it.
My external disk has a folder called Finished Photos and subfolders for years to stay organized.
The other archival step I perform is importing my stock images into my stock catalog. I use multiple Lightroom catalogs. Each year gets its own catalog as I’ve found that helps me organize and reduces churn on catalogs as they get large. I also have a master stock catalog that is set up to import everything in my “Stock” folder. It’s also set up to publish to my stock management web host (Smugmug).
Importing into my stock catalog is easy. I simply open it and import from the “Stock” directory, choosing to skip duplicates. There’s even a right click shortcut for this on the folder in Lightroom named “Synchronize”. Note that Lightroom leaves the photos where they are on disk; no copies are made. Once the photos are imported into their respective folders in Lightroom, I can make virtual copies into the various published collections I use.
Having one stock catalog is really helpful for me. Because everything is there, I can do fast searches on topics, or find photos from a specific shoot really quickly. Once I’ve found the photo, I can print right from Lightroom or perform any other tasks I need. If I’m trying to get the photo onto my web site, I can easily dig the photo up out of my “Stock Promo” folder I talked about above, since all I need is the title and I can go to that one folder to find the photo.
Wrap up
That’s a look at my workflow. Hopefully it was helpful for you as you build your own workflow. Keep in mind that the workflow I use was refined over many years of trial and error, and tweaking things to see if I could make them better. If you are just starting out, don’t expect to have things run as smoothly for you. Give it some time, tweak the things that aren’t working, and improve.
If you have questions, let me know!