One simple strategy to optimize your photography workflow

Now that you have asked the right questions, figured out your purpose and defined your photography workflow steps, what do you do to make everything more efficient ? Is there something extra to be done to tie everything together in a nice and smooth process ? While I believe that there is nothing you can do to eliminate hard and repetitive work, there is one thing you can do to make all that hard work…easier.

Optimize each step of your workflow so that it helps the other steps.

This is the strategy, this is the important thing…this is it! What do I mean? Well, some steps in the STORE workflow can be made much simpler if certain things have already been done properly in previous steps. In other words, you always have to think ahead how your actions in a particular step will affect the other steps. This is true with any workflow, you can always improve the entire workflow if you think about things you can do in a particular step that impact the rest of the steps.

Simple things can have a dramatic impact.

Here are some examples of the things I do that help my workflow move pretty smoothly.

• When Shooting pictures it helps a lot in the Organize step if you set the date on your camera correctly (duh).
• Also, if you set your camera to create a separate folder for each day of shooting that will also help you later when you Transfer your pictures to your computer.
• When Transferring pictures use the automatic renaming of the picture files and folders to match your folder structure.
• Apply tags in an organized manner. Think in terms of domains of tags, or categories of tags.
• Organize your folders so that you can backup your pictures frequently.

Hard work not always required

Any photographer whether a beginner or professional will tell you that the larger their photography collection gets, the harder they have to work to maintain that collection. The repetitive nature of transferring pictures, editing them, cropping them and saving them in different formats will not change no matter what we do. However, as I have explained above, I do believe that if you keep in mind all the steps in your workflow as you step through each phase, this will help you make them flow together.

Essentials for organizing your digital photos

Here are the essential products and services I have come to rely on for many years to keep my media collection organized and safe. Even though these are affiliate links, I wholeheartedly recommend them.

Excellent Lightroom and Picasa alternative. If you need a cheaper and simpler photo manager then ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac (save 50% until Nov 8th) or ACDSee Photo Studio Professional for Windows (new version) is my preferred solution for organizing all my media. It has a very fast browser, great image editing and it's simple to use.

If you do a lot of image editing like I do, I recommend using Adobe Lightroom Classic CC via the annual Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom has best photo editing capabilities even though it comes with a steeper learning curve. If you do image editing, Adobe Lightroom is my favorite.

I recommend Backblaze Personal Cloud Backup for affordable & reliable unlimited cloud backup. I have been using Backblaze for backing up all pictures & videos for more than 5 years now. All my invaluable digital memories are safe and secure. This is the best solution especially if you have a large quantity of media files.

Use a reliable & affordable external hard drive for backing up everything on your computer. It is absolutely essential for keeping all your memories backed up and safe.

Start organizing now using detailed, step-by-step instructions and videos:
Personal Coaching (closed) Independent Course Private Lessons
Reference book Basics book Picasa book

YOURS FREE! 10 crucial steps most people miss when organizing their digital photos

Most people want to just organize their digital pictures and ignore these crucial steps right at the beginning...when they are shooting and transferring their digital pictures. Then they wonder why they can't organize their digital photos! Avoid most people's mistakes and start on the right track!

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