What is a Photo?
That sounds like a dumb question to be starting with, but I need to explain my answer. Or, rather, answers.
There are broadly three types of digital photos in my world:
- Those taken with my iPhone
- Those taken with my DSLR
- Those digitised from prints or negatives
These three types get treated quite differently. Straight away, I can tell you that my workflow for phone photos is… no workflow at all. I have iCloud Photos turned on, so those photos sync to my Mac, where they are backed up by both Time Machine and Backblaze. I do nothing to them after taking them except do some basic adjustments to a handful.
Next most complicated are the digitised photos. Actually, I could also say they are my most complicated because I keep changing both how I digitise them and where I store them. Between my own and old family photographs, I have them all over the place. Suffice to say, they mostly live in a Lightroom catalogue. Well… multiple catalogues. They’re not what this article is about.
That just leaves my DSLR photos. For these, I have a workflow I have been honing for many, many years. Everything that follows is for these.
Shooting
After using a compact digital camera for a couple of years, my first DSLR frame was taken on 10th September 2005. Excepting a few experimental sessions with RAW photos, I generally shot JPEGs until I attended the Classic Fighters Air Show at Easter, 2007.
I shot this show — all 739 frames — in RAW. This stood me in good stead when I accidentally underexposed the vast majority of the photos through a simple slip-up. By December of that year, I had seen the light, so to speak, and I have shot exclusively in RAW ever since.
The two criticisms I hear about RAW are the file size and the absolute need for post-processing. Moore’s Law has taken care of the size issue. My current 25 megapixel camera turns out files around 31 MB in size, easily manageable in the numbers I shoot.
The need for processing is a double-edged sword. It does create work, but if you shoot JPEG, you create work to be done in-camera in nailing every exposure. For the seasoned expert, and for certain subject types, that’s probably not an issue. I may be seasoned, but I am still very much learning. I prefer the flexibility that RAW gives me. Particularly when I am constantly changing my shooting direction for birds and aircraft.
I actually shoot in-camera DNG files. They are almost identically sized to the native Pentax PEF files, but have an important advantage. Lightroom (and other software) will write metadata directly into the files without the need for a separate sidecar file.
Common wisdom says to never alter the original file, lest a gremlin corrupt it. That has never happened to me. I find it way more likely that a sidecar will get separated from its image file or even just deleted. In fact, PhotoLab (see below) writes its own sidecar files with processing information, and I have absolutely messed these up occasionally.
I’ve fairly recently started to geotag most of my images. I’ve gone through multiple processes to achieve this but settled on two that work consistently for me and are easy to accomplish.
My new camera doesn’t have built in GPS, but it does allow a persistent Bluetooth connection to my phone. I run a Pentax app on the phone which talks to the camera and the camera then uses the phone’s GPS to tag the photos. It doesn’t always tag every photo, but mostly it gets the job done. If I care enough (such as in areas I am not familiar with, or I am ranging a long way) I will back this up with the prior process I used.
As my previous camera did not have this Bluetooth capability, I used the free app GPX Tracker on my Apple Watch. You can use it on an iPhone, but my watch is much more “free and clear” to see the sky, where my phone will generally be in a pocket and may lose accurate GPS from time to time. The app allows me to very simply record a track with a few taps. When I’m done, I can save it, transmit the track file to my phone, and from there to my Mac. I find it does not seem to affect the battery very much and yet gives very accurate tracks.
I won’t go into camera settings or shooting techniques. I am still constantly learning from others and trying out new techniques.
Offload and Storage
My current MacBook Pro has a built-in SDXC card reader, which is a real boon. Before this one, I always had a plug-in reader available; usually stored in my camera bag.
Before I insert the card, I always launch Adobe Lightroom Classic. This software is very much a Jekyll and Hyde tool. Many people believe it to be the canonical photo manager and processor, while others despise the subscription billing. I come down a bit differently on this tool. Hereinafter, I will just say “Lightroom” when I mean Lightroom Classic. (There is a different product called “Lightroom CC” which is an entirely different beast.)
I dislike the subscription billing and I don’t think it’s that great a photo processor, but I do believe there is nothing better as a photo manager. During a period I was using solely Lightroom, I got used to the hierarchical keyword system. It has ruined me for anything else. More on that a little later.
With Lightroom open, inserting the card automatically brings up the Import window. Here I select everything (or specific days if I’ve not cleared the card since the last import), ensure my “Master Photos” folder is the target, and click import.
This process copies all the photos onto my internal SSD, then ejects the card. If I’m at home, I will generally put the card back in the camera and format it fairly soon afterwards. If I’m traveling, I will leave them on the card as a backup.
I’ve heard many complicated ingestion approaches, but as you can see, mine is simple. Launch Lightroom, insert card, select all, click Import. It takes seconds.
My backups (again, Time Machine and Backblaze) will back up new photos typically within an hour of them arriving on the Mac. I also have further protection tasks, but I’ll save those for the end, as that is when I perform them.
File Management
Folders
I have Lightroom set to import into a year/month folder hierarchy. This is mostly a means of ensuring no single directory contains gazillions of photos. It does also make it easy to find photos when, for example, I’m looking for the holiday I took in Singapore in April 2019.
Culling
This is easy. I don’t really chimp, and I don’t cull. At all. I usually say I will delete an accidental shutter firing, where it might only show concrete or grass, but I cannot remember the last time that happened.
I do the reverse of culling. I choose which photos I will process and publish. But that comes later.
Processing a photo I have recently taken does not mean I am done with it. I have revisited many photos, sometimes many times. When I haven’t been shooting much, I sometimes trawl through my library for shots that perhaps deserve to see the light of day. This wouldn’t be possible if I did a cull. Storage is cheap. Photos are precious.
Keywords
This is the primary reason I use Lightroom as my “Digital Asset Manager”. A lot of my photos are of aircraft and birds. Lightroom’s keyword hierarchy saves me a TON of time classifying them all. Strap in; this is going to get a little intense.
Birds are relatively simple.
animal
bird
Bar-tailed Godwit (Kuaka, Limosa lapponica)The entries in brackets are synonyms. The time saving is that I can generally type bar and then select Bar-tailed Godwit from auto-complete, and I get all the keywords shown above automatically.
When it comes to aircraft, I go deeper.
aircraft
Cessna
172 (Skyhawk)
172K
ZK-MXP (ZK-MXP2)Here, I will generally type ZK-MXP and all of that comes along for free! See the time savings?!
All Cessna 172s are known as Skyhawks, so I have the synonym at that level. For some aircraft types, a name might be lower down the hierarchy.
The ZK-MXP2 is a convention in the aviation community to indicate that this is the second issuance of this registration. In a very few cases, I have photos of two different aircraft with the same registration. For these, I need to ensure I pick the right entry, but Lightroom makes it clear where they differ, so it’s easy.
I also record the operator of the aircraft (when known) and the location. As the location is usually an airport, I include all known identifiers for these, too. The trading name, ICAO, and, if assigned, IATA codes. I use the ICAO code (which is globally unique) as my primary keyword.
airfield
NZWN (Wellington International Airport, WLG)The airfield keyword is set not to export, as it is only an organisational tool for me within Lightroom.
I also have further hierarchies under the animal structure — you can guess what those might be — and also separate hierarchies for plant and train. These are more recent constructs, with the aircraft structure being my original effort.
Another hierarchy I use for any photo not taken at an airport is this one.
places
Oceania
New Zealand (Aotearoa)
North Island
Wellington
City
Oriental BaySimply typing orie gives me all of that. (It generally takes four letters because of OriginAir.)
If I have a photo of ZK-MXP2 overflying Oriental Bay, it only takes a handful of keystrokes to get 14 keywords (places is set not to export).
People have said this is insane, and I generally do not disagree with them. But I want to have this level of information. It is not uncommon for me to want to find photos of a particular aircraft, or all of a certain type. That photo of a Tūī? I have hundreds, but at least I can get them all on screen quickly.
I recently photographed a rare bird (in these parts, at least) and was surprised to see it was not my first photo of one! Apparently, I have seen them twice in captivity.
Only after I have made myself add ALL the relevant keywords do I allow myself to move onto the next phase.
Geolocation
I mentioned above the two methods I have for capturing the location of each photo. In the case of my new camera, there’s no work to do unless it didn’t get a location for some photos. In my experience so far, the only misses have been among groups of photos taken from the same spot, so a simple copy and paste of the location does the job.
For the older process, I will switch to Lightroom’s Map module and load up the GPX file that was sent from my watch to my phone to my Mac. There is then a simple process to tag the photos based on their timestamps. This does require the camera clock be fairly accurate.
Ironically, connecting my new camera to my phone via Bluetooth will also update its clock, so even if I only get that to work briefly (as has occasionally happened), at least the backup tracking will be accurate.
Selection
This doesn’t really warrant a section, but because I don’t cull, I guess it makes sense it’s here.
At this point, I move over to DxO PhotoLab, in which I look at the same originals in the same folders. Here I can determine which photos are acceptably sharp and have a good composition, or the makings of one. I tend to go through the whole shoot ‘picking’ the ones I think I will publish.
Once I have done this initial pass, I set the library filter to only picked images and then take a second pass through, mainly to get rid of similar shots. Occasionally, I will decide a pick wasn’t warranted, and may return to the full set to pick a different one of the same subject. With the picked images selected, I now move on to the processing.
Processing
I’m not going to go into too much detail here because everyone will want different things and different photographic subjects may demand different treatments. This may warrant an article of its own.
My first step is to apply one of two presets: Aviation or Wildlife. The main difference between these is the Aviation one has more sharpening. The Wildlife one gets used for most other subjects. They both add the highest grade of noise reduction at a moderate level, select Smart Lighting (global), and boost saturation and vibrance. I do like punchy colours.
With the relevant preset applied to each, I then move through the photos and treat each one successively. There are three critical adjustments I make to the majority of photos.
First is composition. I have published some photos with no crop, but they are not in the majority by a long way. Even a 675 mm (equivalent) lens is often not ‘tight’ enough for birds. My publishing goal for Flickr is 6 megapixels, so I can crop quite a lot out of the 25 megapixels I start with.
With scenes that make it obvious, I will frequently need to correct a horizon, as I habitually lean the camera when I’m shooting. For some architectural shots, I do some perspective correction.
For birds on water, horizon correction can be really interesting! If the water is very calm, I can line up some feature of the bird with its reflection. Otherwise, the ripples give a sense of level, though can be misleading if you look too closely. The trick with this is to try to pinpoint two edges of a circular ripple.
Second is light adjustment. This involves the basic exposure level, use of DxO’s Smart Lighting (a powerful tool for very contrasty photos), and a luminance curve if required.
Third is colour. Principally this is the setting of the white balance, as my preset has already boosted the colours in general.
With these three things taken care of, I may then add other adjustments such as fine contrast for details (particularly with close-ups of birds), or add a subtle vignette to tame a bright background.
For more demanding photos, I will perform local adjustments. This might be boosting the subject in brightness or taming a background that is shouting too loudly against the subject.
Finally, I add my watermark. I have two for every year — one white, one black — that are a graphic containing my name in a script font, a copyright for the year, and a URL for my personal website. I always make these very subtle, almost always sitting in one of the four corners. They are not there to stop people stealing my images — which rarely works, anyway — but to let honest people know whose image it is and where they can find out more about my work.
One of the things I love about PhotoLab is that watermarks are added independently to each image and can be tuned visually each time. I always start with one of half a dozen presets (three sizes times two colours) and then choose the best corner and lower the opacity to the point where it is legible but not ‘shouting’.
Output
I have a two-step process for this because I manage my keywords in Lightroom but export the images from PhotoLab.
In PhotoLab, I select all the processed photos and export them using my Flickr preset. This sizes the images to approximately 6 megapixels, regardless of aspect ratio. They are output as high-quality JPEGs in the P3 colour space. These JPEGs contain PhotoLab’s view of the keywords I added in Lightroom, but this does not include the full hierarchy.
Once the images are exported, I select the same images in Lightroom and export them using a preset I have called “Keyword proxy”. This exports small, low-quality JPEGs with a special suffix on the filename. The automation application Hazel sees these special files and uses ExifTool to copy the keywords over to the DxO-made JPEGs before deleting the proxies. This is what gets me the full set of keywords in the images.
At this point, I’m ready to upload my images to Flickr.
Publishing
While Lightroom has native Flickr export capability, my images are exported from PhotoLab. Even if PhotoLab had the same capability, I probably wouldn’t use it. Why? Because Flickr’s own web uploader is both simple and reliable.
After clicking the upload button in the web interface, I drag all the JPEGs into the window. I then sort them in reverse alphabetical order. Flickr displays a Photostream in reverse chronological order of date uploaded by default. Within a single upload operation, the order you use in this step is maintained. It makes sense to me that the most recent photo should be first, and the titles are the camera-assigned filenames, so this simple step achieves it.
I next select relevant photos to add to my Albums and any Groups I participate in. I used to have lots and lots of albums, but a few years ago I pared these back when I realised I was forgetting many of them much of the time, so they weren’t really achieving anything.
I may occasionally choose to assign a meaningful title to one or more photos but, with well over 8,000 published photos, coming up with a title for every one is really rather pointless and so many would be identical. If I do add a title, I will always keep the filename in brackets after it. Being able to instantly cross-reference the Flickr image with the original has been very useful a very many times.
At this point, it will be evident that any keywords that are Māori names with macrons will have weird characters in them. I don’t correct them here because I have a simpler way a little later. I go ahead and complete the upload process, after which the photos are “live” in my Photostream.
To fix the keywords, I use a Lightroom plugin for Flickr by Jeffrey Friedl. While the primary function of this plugin is a publishing stream for Flickr, two of its “extras” help me out often.
First, I manually mark all of the photos in Lightroom that I picked in PhotoLab. They get a green colour label. This makes them easy to find later and I can use the attribute filter to easily only see published photos.
With all the green-labelled photos from the shoot selected, I ask the plugin to automatically associate them with their Flickr URLs, as if the plugin had uploaded them itself. With this done, I then ask it to resend the metadata. Specifically, I ask it to send the keywords. This successfully corrects the macrons.
That completes my Flickr workflow, but I also like to add the JPEGs to my Apple Photos library. This is done by simply dragging them into the app and adding to any albums as I see fit. I then delete the JPEGs.
Archiving
Near the start, I described my backups — Time Machine and Backblaze. These give me a local and a cloud backup respectively. But I also archive my originals. “What’s the difference?” I hear you asking. Let me tell you a story.
Way back in the beginning, I was a Lightroom user. Lightroom did everything for me from ingesting to publishing. When Apple lowered the price on their competitor, Aperture, I made the switch to that to gain better integration into (then) Mac OS X. Then Apple pulled the plug on Aperture, so I moved everything back to Lightroom again! Some time later, I moved to Luminar, and then to DxO (where I remain to this day and for the foreseeable future).
With PhotoLab, I was going back over lots of old photos and re-processing them. (I stopped counting when I got past 2,000.) One day, while going through my photos, I noticed I had no folders for October, November, or December of 2010. I do have the odd month here and there with no photos, but three contiguous months including Christmas? It didn’t add up.
The most basic of backups exactly replicate the source. Both Time Machine and Backblaze extend this with versioning. Time Machine keeps old versions as long as it has space. Backblaze kept them for 30 days by default (when this happened, now 1 year) and optionally allows you to pay extra for longer. I had paid for 1 year. This is an important thing to realise about backups — if you delete an original file, it will eventually age out of the backups!
I switched to PhotoLab in 2019. I worked out I had mislaid the three folders in my move, either to or from Aperture — at least 5 years prior. They were not available in my backups! After sweating for a few days, I began a last ditch search of all my spare (including many bare) hard drives I had lying around. Fortunately, I had made a full clone of my data for the process of moving from one Mac to another, at a time when the folders still existed. Had I happened to need some space and seen this backup, I would have wiped it without hesitation. I recovered 644 photos including ones of two very rare aircraft types and the sole photo I’ve managed (even to this day) of one species of bird, plus many from a short holiday.
I got lucky. I decided this required a solution — archiving. The difference (in my use) is that archives do not (normally) delete anything, ever.
To achieve this, I have a similar two-pronged approach to the backups. Locally, I use the rsync utility to copy the original files to a portable SSD. For the cloud, Backblaze has a separate service called B2, which is basically “a bucket” in the cloud. (They literally call the storage areas buckets.) I use the rclone utility to do essentially the same thing — copy the local originals up to B2. The commands I use to achieve both of these explicitly forbid deletes on the target. In both cases, I also allow versioning to occur. It happens, occasionally, that I update keywords on images and I will sometimes (though not always) think to update B2 with the new versions.
I did a massive reorganisation of some of my keyword structures a couple of years ago, after which I asked B2 to delete all old versions, but note that means pruning to the latest version. No file would disappear completely. There is risk in doing even that (which is why I don’t often prune) because an update to an original file might corrupt it. In my experience, I’ve only ever had one original file get corrupted, and that was down to accessing it directly on the memory card from an iPad.
I have a complete write-up of the B2 process in the post Using Backblaze B2 to safeguard your photos.
Sharing
At this point, I’m done. Technically, once they’re on Flickr, they’re shared, but I also put some in other places — in one or more of several Slack communities, several forums, on Mastodon, or the photo service Glass. If I do this straight away, I might delay deletion of the JPEGs, but mostly I will do it later and this is almost always done from the copy in my Apple Photos library.
For my aircraft photos, from time to time, I will create a blog post on a site I set up expressly for this purpose. If you’re not a Flickr member but want to see my aircraft photos, you can visit my blog or follow it with RSS.
Special Uses
The process I have described above is what happens to all my DSLR photos that end up seeing the light of day. Occasionally, I use photos for very specific purposes, such as my JustBirds.photo website, or providing them to some organisation for use, or even an attempt to sell them. In each case, I will usually use some bespoke process suited to the task. About the only consistent feature of this will be the use of Virtual Copies in PhotoLab.