Bluejake

I wrote about my process on unrelatednews a while back so have a look at this first: post at Unrelated news.

1. what do you do with the pictures you don't put up? do you delete them, put them all into a "not used" folder, etc, and do you classify them in any way?

Well I'm obsessed with backing up everything, even complete crap, I keep. I try to treat my images like a roll of film, not really necessary, just my OCD kicking in. I rate my photos with iView, level 1 goes to post process, level 2 gets a "maybe" marking for when times are slow or when I'm not shooting anything I like. I narrow down the selection process during the post stage, the top select goes to Overshadowed, the rest would also end up on my flickr or never posted.

2. do you keep a folder for favorites/portfolio shots, or for print-worthy stuff separate, or do you just know where those images are?

I use my site for that, I usually remember where the shots are. My iView catalogue helps the search process.

3. what images do you keep locally? original images, processed images, web sized images, or all of the above?

I try to keep all photos locally to a certain point, I keep all the RAW, the jpegs, the C1 processed tiffs, the Photoshop processed PSD and the web jpeg. After two months or so I will backup the folder to DVD.

B) Eliot, Slower.net

1. what do you do with the pictures you don't put up? do you delete them, put them all into a "not used" folder, etc, and do you classify them in any way?

1) Download from card into a folder YYYY_MM_DD

2) A while later (important!), cull (delete) obviously bad/suboptimal
files, and append "_c" to the folder name. Sometimes I'll do this a few times, appending another "c" each time. (This helps me version folders when I'm backing up.)

3) Open the ones that seem most interesting in photoshop and run through my standard process. Never rename files.

4) Periodically I weed through "processed" folder and put the ones I
might post into a "go" folder. Trash the rest of the web-sized versions. When I want to post something, I look in the go folder.

2. do you keep a folder for favorites/portfolio shots, or for print-worthy stuff separate, or do you just know where those images are?

Favorites are a moving target, so I don't bother. The goal is never to post anything I don't like a lot, so I use the site to find things that I like the most at a given moment.

3. what images do you keep locally? original images, processed images,web sized images, or all of the above?

I archive totally untouched files. If I prepare something for print, I might save that somewhere as a 24-bit PNG, though print processing is a moving target too.

Another (better?) approach would to do all work in adjustment layers,
and to archive the PSDs.

C) Red, 990000.com

this is a great topic.

I always go back to check on variations of a shot just to see if my
current brain still agrees with yesterday's brain. Eliot was absolutely right when he once said something along the lines of, "just shoot as much as you can and worry about it later."

and on that note, my only system is using dates and keywords in naming my archive directories. within each dated directory I have an "edit" directory which contains the "good shots" (TIFF), a "www" directory for lightweight versions (JPG), and a "raw" directory which contains everything (CR2 or NEF). and just recently, I've added a "print" directories that contain color-profile-converted (TIFF) versions that are printer-paper-specific. for example, "/print_2200matte", would stand for: "printing files for Epson 2200 Matte paper".

what the directory structure looks like:

/photo_archive
  /2004
    /200412
      /20041225_XmasParty
        /raw
        (ie. raw_0001.NEF)
        /edit
        (ie. edit_0001.TIFF)
        /www
        (ie. www_0001.JPG)
        /print_2200matte
        (ie. print_0001.TIFF)

and because I drag and drop shit by accident all the time, I prefix all the files with raw/edit/www/print using a batch process. I'd like to see what everyone else does, just to compare. there was a similar thread on this at photoblogs.org a while back... photoblogs post.

D) Joe, Joe's NYC

My system isn't too much different from the other guys'.

I pull shots off my CF card using iView Media Pro and into a big folder that keeps shots from the past month, creating a new folder and iView catalog every month or two.

I immediately batch-rename the entire set and sometimes add keywords for searching.

Then I review the day's shots one at a time, deleting maybe a quarter for being unusuable in any forseeable future. I hit "7" to yellow-label the ones I'll want to see again -- whether to print, post on joe's nyc, or email to friends. The rest remain in "deep archive."

Next I display only the labelled shots and start to process for posting on the photoblog.

Thus, my main sorting is inside iView Media Pro. I have some iView sub-catalogs, like for the shots in the Idaho show and the shots for nymetro.com. The original files are in huge folders, but I can sort and locate any of them using the iView browser window and its search and sort capabilities.

All of those original image files are on one 60-gig external firewire drive. I have that drive duplicated nightly onto another external disk as part of a Retrospect backup, and I copy all new images every week or so onto DVD-R disks for archiving.

The images that I've processed and tweaked, etc., end up on my internal hard drive. One folder for majorly-tweaked images that are ready for printing at a moment's notice, another folder for images that have been uploaded to my server for the blog.

So far, I've found that iView is a decent way to search and locate images, so I don't have any sophisticated naming scheme, but I'm looking over all these other methods you guys use to see if I might be better served adopting some of your ideas...

graffiti