it'd definitely going to take me a while to get to a million. I'm publishing about 200 photos to flickr a week right now and at this pace it will take 92 years to get there. I'll get the pace up to 400-500 a week in the future though. Better technology should make processing easier and someday my kids will be grown and I'll be able to quit my day job and focus on this even more. The best photos have yet to be taken.
- Thomas Hawk
When I think about this I realize your best days are ahead of you.
- Russellreno
What's your shot/publish ratio? I mean, on average how many shots do you take to produce those you publish?
- Yuval Atzmon
atzmon, I probably average about 2,000 shots a week that I shoot. And I'm probably processing 300 or so of those a week at present, so I'm probably keeping about 15%. The other 85% never get processed and are kept in my archives. I'm trying only to process and publish the shots that I think meet a certain quality criteria.
- Thomas Hawk
You upload a lot more than I do. I have about 40,000 pictures but only about 2000 uploaded. Mostly because I have not gotten around to processing more. =)
- Jauder Ho
from twhirl
Jauder, the good news is that processing will only get easier in the future. I've watched it get better with each successive Adobe release. Lightroom 2.0 is the best processing tool yet. It's not necessarily faster per se though because with more tools there are yet even more ways to tweak a photo hence even more time. But the tools to speed things up are coming too. auto geotagging, better anti dust tech, faster processing speeds, easier online tools with faster broadband are all around the corner.
- Thomas Hawk
16,000 ?? Yikes. Cool number. Congrats.
- Charlie Anzman
This photo is total awesome. It is made even more awesome by the knowledge that there are 15,999 more photos just as awesome as this one. EDIT: This photo is now my desktop background. :)
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
Always loved that quote " The best photos have yet to be taken. - Thomas Hawk"
- johnpiercy
Congrats, I even don't think I took so many photos in my life. :)
- Ferhad Fidan
from fftogo
@thomas: Yahoo should be giving Flickr to you for free. You'd do a great job with it. And it would be historical: the first user-generated (company) acquisition :)))
- Alberto D'Ottavi
from fftogo
I guess the metier of 'photo editor' is kaput...or, at least, greatly altered....
- Chris Gulker
You know they are going to delete your account without warning once you hit 999,999, right? :)
- Ace
Ace, I hope not, I'd be so pissed. Actually I think alot of what gets me so upset about all the content/account deletion issues is that I really do worry that it actually will happen to me. Flickr staff hates me and they'd *love* to delete my account. I worry that I'll wake up one morning and everything will have been nuked. I suppose that's why I'd like to see them enact the ability to...
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- Thomas Hawk
Holyshit! You have taked just couple of photos...
- k00pa
Because this post is from September last year k00pa :)
- Simon Wicks
@Chris Gulker. Someday I hope to work with a photo editor. God knows I need to. I like to think of my Flickrstream today more as the raw material in a lot of ways for future projects. A good photo editor adds tremendous value to shaping a photographer's imagery.
- Thomas Hawk
hope we won't see a similar post next year but with the words of the FF founder
- Rares Matei
too bad... i already moved away from them, like i am doing from flickr and FF.... simpy+picasa would do, and for now identi.ca would have to substitute FF while there is no FLOSS FF
- ovigia
first pic: Putting up their dukes, boxer crabs in Indonesia helped Italian amateur photographer Marchione Giacomo score a TKO in the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science's 2009 Underwater Photography Contest. The school announced its contest winners on April 15, 2009. Also called pompom crabs, boxer crabs clench small, stinging sea anemones for self-defense, though the crabs have been known to substitute sponges and other tiny creatures ... in a pinch. Judged by a panel of professional photographers and fine artists, the fifth annual Risenstiel School amateur-photographer contest attracted 918 entries from 23 countries.
- Cee Bee
yeah that's a great photo. i really like the second photo as well of a pigmy seahorse
- Cee Bee
Yes, please, user backgrounds are cool, and never is too long. Come on, I am sure guys at FriendFeed can come up with reasonable solution for custom user pages. All whitey-bluey is cool but gets boring for us, long-time frf residents. Please, I know there're lots of you conservative guys, but can't you just accept an idea that *your* friendfeed will stay the same, while *my* will be pretty with colours? Everybody's happy that way.
- Urbansheep
Personally, I think that bringing in those backgrounds would be distracting. At most, letting users set their own background that only they see would be best, and that can already be done by using something like Greasemonkey.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
You can already do that with user defined CSS, but it would be nice to see it added and not have to go through the trouble of doing it ourselves.
- April Russo (app103)
I don't have a problem with themes, like the Gmail thing, just for you in your own personal space for no-one else to see but you. That'd be cool, just don't force the rest of us to look at your theme ala MySpace or Twitter. I swear, if FF ever does that, I will gouge my eyes out.
- Pete Delucchi
Hhmmmm, well then...you are now all in the party pooper list
- sofarsoShawn
It may become shitty. Maximum permissible is that FF provides some basic ones.
- Manish Sinha
don't see how it would help, it'd just make it slower to load. personal colour settings may be worth it, i guess, but backgrounds? meh
- immaterial
Wall papers, and I like the Google theme idea now...those one's are hot!
- sofarsoShawn
That would force me to never see a profile on FF. Please, no wallpapers or customization. Or at least a setting like: -Do not show me custom designs-
- Leandro Ardissone ⍨
I wouldn't mind backgrounds/themes. Homogeneous = boring for me. Thing is, I rarely look at profiles, so I'd be amenable to just making FriendFeed less eyeball-searing.
- MiniMage TKDteacher of FF
Friendfeed needs custom backgrounds for sure. Even if it's just allowing one column for design. People want to have the choice to express or not express identity.
- PurpleZoe
I'd much rather friendfeed allowed me to customize how the site looks to me, custom backgrounds can make the site disjointed and often hard to read, so i'd like an option to hide them in settings ;-) Skinnable embedding widgets I am fully in favour of as they tend to be used to make the widget fit to the look of the page it's on
- immaterial
Interesting differences on how I use to do it. I usually copy the photos of the CF card to my desktop, geotag them (either automatically using an Amod GPS logger and GPSPhotoLinker or - just like you - manually with Geotagger - thanks to @craigstanton for that btw) then import them using Lightroom and apply some keywords during that step. From there it's pick, edit, output, upload.
- Holger Eilhard
Thanks for sharing. I didn't know about Pro Photo Tools - I'll have to look into it.
- John (a.k.a. dendroica)
Holger, I don't geotag first because 85% of my photos or so I never finish or publish. It would be too much unnecessary work to geotag everything for me. I suppose if the entire shoot was at one location this might be preferable, but frequently I'm walking around a lot and don't want to do any more keywording and geotagging than I have to.
- Thomas Hawk
Thomas, have you ever considered getting a logger that you carry around to ease that process? Or using the - well, pretty expensive - automatic Canon solution in form of that WFT battery grip?
- Holger Eilhard
Holger, I have thought about that and will probably end up doing that in the end. I'm not crazy about having to use the battery grip with my 5D M2, which is already very heavy and bulky and I'm also not crazy about having to synch up software and my images later with an external unit. Most likely though I'd expect to begin using the Canon solution (probably within the next year) on walks where I'm moving around alot and not using it for single location shoots which are easier to mass geotag.
- Thomas Hawk
I know there are GPS units for Nikons that sit on the flash shoe and are pretty low profile. That might work better than a battery grip. Excellent post, by the way.
- Ken Davidson
I hope Canon will release a cheaper solution to solve that problem. Getting an 700 Euro BG + 100 Euro GPS receiver isn't really the way I like... The Nikon thing is just ~200 Euro and gets the job done.
- Holger Eilhard
Ken, for Canon there's only the battery grip (wireless file transmitter, not the regular BG) which allows you to plug in a GPS receiver...
- Holger Eilhard
Thanks for sharing this. Was wondering why you don't keyword before you export the .jpgs. Also, since you don't mention DNG, I'm assuming you don't use it. Was wondering what your thoughts were on DNG.
- Andy Roth
Andy, I suppose I could keyword before I export. I'm not sure what I really gain from that though. I suppose I like keywording later because I can get my developing done faster on individual images and export them out --that way I can begin seeing processed photos on my screensaver faster. This way if there blemishes I can still fix them.
- Thomas Hawk
The advantage is, if you keyword before you export, both the RAW files and the .jpgs will contain the keywords.
- Andy Roth
As far as DNG, I've never felt like I get much from that over RAW. As the photos are already RAW it seems unnecessary to do an additional conversion to DNG when I don't really understand the value of that format other than it is a more open format than Canon's proprietary RAW format. Personally I think that I'll always have a way to access those Canon files or at least have access to a...
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- Thomas Hawk
In terms of keywording RAW files, I guess I haven't really seen the value there when the exact same image is keyworded in JPG. It's pretty simple for me to search for a JPG file either on my hard drive or on Flickr/Zooomr and simply refer to the date in the metadata if I need to find the original RAW file, but I suppose whether you keyword before export or after export really is simply a matter of personal preference.
- Thomas Hawk
Interesting that you use the Canon Camera Window for downloading. You may be the first pro I've run into who depends on it, but it makes sense.
- Nick Savides
Nick, it's just super easy and reliable and gets the job done. There may in fact be better ways of doing it but it's probably one of those things that because it's not broke, why fix it. If I saw tangible evidence towards a better way to offload photos I'd certainly consider it. For a while I was annoyed that Camera Window would auto start Canon's processing software after it finished transferring the files, but then I just deleted that software and it stopped autoloading.
- Thomas Hawk
the other thing about Camera Window is that it's lighter than Lightroom and takes less memory/resources. So if I'm out on a shoot and take a coffee break for a few minutes to offload files I don't need to boot up Lightroom necessarily. Normally under that scenario I just want to get the images off my card as quick and fast as possible. It does mean that later I need to synch the folders with Lightroom but that's not really a big deal for me.
- Thomas Hawk
I liked your thoughts on using A and B folders to order your uploads. I've been doing that for a while, but in general I got tired of the manual upload process. I figured time could be saved by automating this, so I wrote a script that runs each day and chooses random A and B pictures to upload via the Flickr API. Once they're up. they are removed from the A and B folders. I never miss a day uploading, and it keeps me motivated to replenish those upload queues.
- Tom Harrison
Great TH! More stuff for me to change. In the process I realized how out of date my workflow posts are. Time to update them methinks! http://www.phillprice.com/index...
- Phill Price
Tom that sounds like an excellent way to automate thing and establishes your geek cred at a much higher level than mine. ;) I'd have no idea how to do a script for that. I actually like the manual process though as I can determine the exact order that they are to be uploaded in while looking at them.
- Thomas Hawk
Haha, yeah Computer Science nerd here. I might publish the script at some point.
- Tom Harrison
10 TB of photos is a _LOT_. I hope to one day get there but I my D40 doesn't make big enough RAW files. :) How do you search across all those images? Is there software reliable and powerful enough to not choke on that much data? I wish I could buy some sort of white label Flickr for this purpose.
- EricaJoy
(I just use pixelpipe to upload from LR or if a delayed post I send a delayed email (through pixelpipe) - it posts to phillprice.com automatically (through my own WP plugin) when there's a new photos with the same title in all four places (smugmug, ipernity, zooomr, flickr) then th fave and comment grabbing comes in too; bliss!
- Phill Price
Nice write up TH and well explained. Your process is almost identical to my current process except for a few minor things such as your geo tagging processes.
- Justin Korn
Thomas - thanks for sharing; both your workflow and your photos. We mere photographic mortals can only aspire to your throughput, but sharing elements of the workflow lets us feel just a bit closer to the bar you're setting.
- Rob Kramer
As a side note - fiddling w/ LR means it now rather handily imports photos off the memory card, and drops into folders organised and named by date, which works great for organising. Also, Jeffrey Friedl's got a great series of plugins that export to Flickr (and Facebook, among others) with the bonus that a metadata field for 'uploaded to' either service is marked yes or no - another option for keeping track of what's been published.
- Rob Kramer
Yes thanks for sharing. This technical stuff is always very intriguing. Here's an interesting question - how much awareness do you have of what's in your photo library and where it is? I'm thinking about my own library of about 13,000 images of which 4,300 have been processed and I can still usually see a photo and know when and where it was taken. I'm wondering at what point that starts to become more difficult. Or does one never lose track much?
- Tom Harrison
You shoot so many photos I'm surprised you're manually geo-tagging photos the way you are. I would recommend a more automated method. I run a little app on my iPhone 3G called Trails which records my movements as I do a photowalk. It records a number of way points along the way and in the end you end up with a GPX file. Jeff Friedl has a cool little plugin for Lightroom...
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- Kenny Louie
Simple, yet effective. Inspiring for me to get up to speed
- Bruno Raymond
Thanks for doing this Thomas. Always useful to share and understand workflows regardless of the topic.
- Mark Krynsky
Thank you for sharing. How do you carry your stuff all day? Backpack? Bags? I know that having the camera with you full time it's the rule no. 1 but I believe it must be really tiring. When I go shooting I always try to limit as much as possible the extra lenses I take with me, just to be more free and comfortable.
- ialla
Interesting article about your workflow. About DNG there is one huge advantage in my opinion. You keep all your metadata in one single file and get rid of the sidecars. The main disadvantage is the time it takes to convert the RAW-files to DNG. Otherwise I work very much like you except that I use Lightroom for import and HoudahGeo for geotagging.
- Håkan Dahlström
Thanks for sharing this Thomas, I am actually thinking of implementing part of your workflow in mine. I think I have really come to a point now wehere I have to start thinking about my own personal workflow very seriously. One question: Do you delete all unflagged photos afetr your LR Session?
- Alexander Kesselaar
ialia, I use a Lowepro camera backpack (the CompuDayPak) that goes with me everywhere every day. Erica, I often will use Flickr or Zooomr to search for photos by tags and then look at the date of the image and go to that folder when need be. Sometimes I'll use desktop search if I can't find an image, but it seems to be slower.
- Thomas Hawk
As for geotagging: Wouldn't it be nice if I could correlate my 'date + time taken' data in my picture with my iPhone GPS information? How close would you have to synchronize the clocks to get a reasonably accurate stamp...?
- Charlie Owen
Crap. Kenny Louie said above you can already do this. Amazing.
- Charlie Owen
Thomas, great, same backpack as I have. Still weighs I lot though...
- ialla
And behind the scenes...All this takes a very very long time so it is peppered with brief gasps for air, hugs & kisses for his wife whenever he comes w/in 3 ft, playing hoops with the 2 boys, reading to all 4 children, providing guidance on homework & conflict resolution, pouring his wife a glass of wine nightly followed by a foot rub & netflix to coax her to sleep so he can continue...
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- Mrsth
@Mrsth: I can totally imagine that whole scene in my head. Incredible. :)
- Bryan Villarin
Thomas, I would love to know your secrets on time management...I honestly don't see how you can do it all and still have a full time job to boot! Whew! @Mrsth I am impressed!
- Susan Dennis
I like having each service as an individual contact. Much easier. Can we see the same for Pownce?
- Chris Nixon
Well, IMified has taken bot to a next level.. I even created a customized option to check my google calendar appointments for today (a quick schedule for today) by interacting with bot! Not sure, if they have one for Pownce..
- Jigar Mehta
from bTT
One year later. Just bumping this because it's the one year anniversary of the only item on FriendFeed to get more than 400 likes. (452 at the moment)
- Ken Sheppardson
"Tom Thumb is the name of this little rascal and he wants to be the world's smallest dog. Or perhaps it's his owners that want him to be such."
- Thomas Hawk
from Bookmarklet
you should have heard the chorus of ahhhhhh's when I showed this photo to my kids this morning of what may be the world's smallest dog. It's a new three-ounce Chihuahua-Jack Russell puppy.
- Thomas Hawk
"Selective Twitter Status lets you update your Facebook status from Twitter - BUT you can choose which tweets you want - just end a tweet with #fb when you want to post it as your Facebook status - simple!"
- Kol Tregaskes
from Bookmarklet
Yeah, I'd like it too. And to underscore the usefulness of such a feature I created this room with the deliberate intent of deleting it as soon as "delete room" becomes available. http://friendfeed.com/rooms...
- Dominic Jones
Is there any way to add a hashtag-search result from Twitter into FriendFeed? The Atom feed provided by search.twitter.com is kind of useless here since FriendFeed seems not to display the name of the original author of each tweet in there :-(
I was trying this this morning. I would be super-useful to have a special service created for Twitter searches that displays author and maybe even their thumbnail.
- Ken Morley
"This script will improve the speed experience. It boosts the number of articles that prefetched on the Google Reader's expanded view."
- mjc
from Bookmarklet
"Nikon announced an update to its 50mm f/1.4 lens on Monday, a relatively high-speed mainstay set to go on sale for $440 in December."
- cecily
from Bookmarklet
I will stick with my 1.8 50 mm lens I bought for $95. Works great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Tamon Yanagimoto
There's a guy who teaches kids to do this in the stream during the LEAF festival at Black Mountain, NC. On Day 1 it's a stream. By Day 3 it's a faerie garden.
- Dan Conover
I'm still awed by this, especially the first pic. Mind boggling
- Mo Kargas