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Fast Workflow Tutorial

    If there is one thing I almost never want to be called, its slow.  I'm always looking for ways to do things more efficiently, whether it's through using a gaming mouse, walking a less busy route to class, or packing snack bags once a week.

    I think I've optimized my photography workflow about as much as I possibly can.  When I take pictures at baseball or basketball games for my job with the athletic department, I often go through and edit/upload the pictures within 1.5 hours of the game ending.  

    This last year I took pictures and video for the Clemson Dancers showcase.  I took more than 3,000 pictures, and 2 hours of video (42 different dances).  I managed to sort through, edit, and post 900 pictures throughout the next two weeks.  Additionally, I synced up the audio individually for every dance, and gave the club DVD's of the performance before summer vacation started.  Several members of the club said they didn't remember anyone else that had returned the pictures/video that quickly.  

My photo worflow diagra

Overview

  1. Make a new folder in my Google Drive/Pictures/2017.  Copy/Paste pictures there

  2. Use FastPictureViewer to delete 70-90% of the pictures I took

  3. Import the remaining pictures to Lightroom, usually applying a preset to all and then cropping individually

  4. Export pictures in a subfolder at greatly reduced quality (1500kb/picture)

  5. Create a "quick favorites" folder and put ~10 favorites in it

  6. Share!

Computer Folder Organization

Folder structure on your computer is important so that you can find the pictures later. 

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I actually don't use the built in "Documents", "Pictures", etc folders on my computer.  I installed Google Drive for Desktop (link) and made folders in my google drive of "Documents", "Pictures", "Music", etc.  That way anything I save is constantly backed up to Google Drive, so even if my laptop and computer explodes I won't lose anything.  

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Next, I have my Pictures folder sorted by year.  So I have a 2015 folder, 2016, 2017, etc.  I use calendar year instead of academic year, but either would work.  

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I title my folders  "mm-dd Title of Thing"​  so a football game on September 2 against Kent State might be "09-02 Football vs Kent State".  If I know I'll be shooting a lot of a similar subject I'll try to keep that first word the same.  For example, all of my senior photoshoot folders are "xx-xx Senior FirstName LastName".  Soccer games are "xx-xx soccer vs OpponentName". 

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Once I make the right folder and name it in the right place, I copy all the pictures from the SD card to that folder.  I don't recommend sorting through pictures with them still on the SD card because they will be slower to load, and you don't have a recycle bin in case you delete a picture you want to keep later.  

Cutting down pictures

A common problem that photographers face nowadays is having too many pictures.  It's easy to leave a football game with 1,000 or even 2,000 pictures.  However, your audience (family, Facebook friends, whoever) doesn't want to scroll through more than ~50 pictures at a time.  It's the photographer's job to sort through these pictures and select only the best shots.

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I use the program "FastPictureViewer" to help cut down pictures.  I noticed in the default Windows photo viewer there is a slight delay going from one picture to another, and when you're going through hundreds of pictures that delay can really add up.  So this program, FastPictureViewer, is designed to be as fast as possible and not have any lag when viewing pictures.  You can press X while viewing pictures to mark them for deletion, then delete the pictures all at once at the end.  (That way you don't have to wait for the picture to be deleted). 

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Furthermore, I have a gaming mouse, (Logitech G602) with programmable buttons.  I set up one button to type x and then the right arrow when I click it, so that I just have to do one thing to mark a picture for deletion and go to the next photo.  

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