Nick Savides - Comments

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

Nice thank you for sharing, cool read. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

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... more... - 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

I don't know how he did it, but it's amazing - Daniele Di Gregorio

...great share @THawk! - .LAG liked that

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... more... - 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

thawk, great post. and some great comments. 1) you should consider releasing your lightroom development presets (like Matt does http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/archive... ) 2) in order to get the flickr pics onto my blog (using BlogEngine.net), i wrote a little extension that grabs the latest, formats them in a "lightbox". AutoFlickr. that saves me lots of copy&pasting. http://autoflickr.codeplex.com/ demo--> http://webguide.hopto.org/autofli... - big luzer

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... more... - 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

Nick Savides

samys.com: Digital and Film Photography and Consumer Electronics - http://www.samys.com/

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a west-coast alternative to B&H - Nick Savides

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An interesting interface to put online printed magazines. - Nick Savides

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The guy behind the CG Chips Ahoy commercial. - Nick Savides