Monday October 6
 
18:04
 
Photo Organisation On Macs 3 - The Ultimate Workflow

I am in heaven.

A few months ago when I bought my Mac, I looked at trying to make my photography workflow more efficient and at the same time move it from PC to Mac. I wanted something which would handle capturing and organising my new photos, but also easily let me manage my existing 100+ GB of past photos, and make post processing easier

For organising and storing new photos my Windows workflow was efficient:

- Download Pro to automatically grab photos from my camera, lossless rotate as necessary, and rename with date, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, etc in the filename.
- Directory structure of: Group/Date and Event/Photo
- Syncback to nightly copy the files to a backup location

But when it came to viewing or post processing, I was essentially navigating a directory structure, making copies, and firing up Photoshop - and it was a pain to dig out anything in the past. That book I was looking at sometime in Korea? All the photos with my friend Eyal in them? The only way to find such things was with XP search.

So I looked at the heavyweights on the Mac to see if I could improve matters. Something that would let me capture and organise new photos, and efficiently view, group, and organise new and old photos, and do pp.

Aperture looked promising at first - but it ran like a Jalopy and crashed like a joyrider on my top of the range iMac.

iPhoto was nice, but too simple. It rearranged my photos into it’s own structure effectively grouping everything into one big linear sequence of events - not fun when you have thousands of events - and it couldn’t handle splitting libraries across different volumes.

Lightroom was the best of the bunch. A joy to use, it kept photos organised and could handle multiple libraries - but it had one big problem: SmartCollections (like Smart Playlists in iTunes) couldn’t search folder names. The effectively meant that I’d be navigating a directory structure to find anything - I couldn’t say “Show me all the photos with Eyal in the event name” because my event names were in the folder names, and smart collections didn’t search folder names.

In the middle of this I bought myself a Flickr Pro account since Flickr Pro offers unlimited storage - so now once I had everything organised on my Mac, I had to get it up to Flickr without reorganising everything. That created its own problems since no Flickr upload tool could create sets automatically based on folder name or tag - I would have to upload 100GB in individual sets. Not good.

In the end I did what all good techies do - I threw my hands up in the air and said: “The only way I’m going to get this done is to write it myself!”

And so I did.. or at least I started to. After an enthusiastic beginning, I got about halfway though the task.. and other things in my life caught up with me and the Perl started to gather dust.

A few months down the line, thanks to Eyal, I realised the Lightroom was out of Beta. Could they have solved the “searching on folder name” issue that I reported to them before?

I downloaded the trial and fired it up, added in some test folders, and started building a Smart Collection. One of the folders was named “harajuku” so I tried searching for that.. Filename - no luck. All searchable exif data - no luck. Damn it, I thought. And then I saw it - in the list of searchable fields was “Folders”. A few seconds later I had a workable Smart Collection and a big smile on my face.

But that wasn’t the end of my joy - for I discovered Jeffrey Friedl’s Flickr Export Plugin for Lightroom. Not only does this seemlessly allow uploading to Flickr, but it can automagically create sets based on any criteria.. such as folder name!

Flickr Uploader and the iPhoto uploader have an annoying limitation - you can only specify a single set when uploading photos. That means you either have to upload set by set, or upload everything and organise in Flickr. But not so with Jeffrey’s tool. A quick setup of AutoDest to be {Folder}, and every image is uploaded to a set automagically named the same as the folder it is in. With this I can select a bunch of photos - say 100 events - set the uploader running, and I’d have everything organised into sets on Flickr with nothing more to do.

Even better, tags can be created from Exif and Lightroom data. For example, adding the dynamic tag {YYYY}{MM}{DD} means that whatever photo I am looking at in Flickr, I can click that tag to see the other photos that I took on the same day. Or adding ISO{ISO|”na”} will allow me to see all the photos I have on Flickr at ISO1600. Or “Rating:{Rating|’0′}” will give me tags in Flickr to see photos that I rate with 5 stars, etc, in Lightroom. Marvellous.

The combination of the new Lightroom and Jeffrey’s tool means that I now have a workflow that can do everything I want. I can grab my photos from the camera, organise and postprocess them the way I want, and then fire them up to Flickr without a single thought - the tool is even intelligent enough to not reupload previous photos unless they have changed.

For searching old photos, I can take full advantage of Smart Collections in Lightroom - and when I’m away from home, I can search the descriptions or look for the relevant sets in Flickr.

There was just one final piece to this puzzle: backup. Of course I have backup when sending to Flickr, but I still want a local backup which is automatic and outside of Time Machine (which throws up “Backup failed” messages for no reason almost daily). Thankfully I found a way to do that a few weeks ago - run Syncback in Windows reading from my Mac directory and sync to my network drive. It’s not the most elegant solution but it is surprisingly difficult to get automated backup from a Mac to a Linux network drive. I don’t care about Mac “properties” being lost - I just want to make sure my photos are copied somewhere safe in case my disk dies. Syncback will do that. I have found nothing else on the Mac that works.

And there I have it. Assuming Lightroom and the plugin don’t crash when I throw the full 100GB at them, I have the complete perfect single tool for my entire workflow. A workflow that lets me do everything in one tool - and more conveniently that before, since I have Lightroom’s power at home and Flickr’s accessibility when away.

And that’s why I’m in heaven. I have been trying to work this out since June - and I never expected to find something that works so well.

A huge thank you to Jeffrey for creating such an powerful piece of software and giving it away free.