[tps_title]8 Steps to Organizing and Editing Photos[/tps_title]
Hi everyone! This is Brian! I’m excited to share my favorite steps with you for photo organization! This is a topic I’m SUPER passionate about! There’s a lot of advice online about how to do this, and I’ve got to be honest. I disagree with a lot of it. Their ideas may work but in the long run, they also cause a lot of problems. Let’s jump in! Give my methods a try, and if you have any questions, consider taking my online course or email me at brian@fioria.us!
Create a Workflow Order
Before we organize, edit or backup our photos, it’s important to create a Workflow Order. When we don’t have a workflow order, this is often where the chaos begins. I always tell my Adobe Photo Organization students that organizing and editing images is like grocery shopping. If you’re starving or super excited about a new jam and peanut butter you bought at the grocery store, you can’t pull into the garage and go make a PBJ while leaving the rest of the groceries in the car. Why not? Simple. The ice cream will melt, the lettuce start to wilt, and your fish will start to stink! My mom taught me (and my wife confirms) that we have to bring all the groceries in the house and put them away before making a snack.
This is what it’s like when photographers come home from a photo shoot, and they are super excited to edit their favorite photos. Instead of taking care of their photos as a whole with a sustainable workflow order…they jump to their favorites and the photo mess begins. Whether we want to share with friends on Facebook or order a beautiful canvas for our walls, below are the ordered steps of a workflow that get photos from the camera to the final product.
Our 8 Steps
- Import Images: We use Adobe’s Lightroom “IMPORT” command to import and begin organizing our photos to a consistent location. (See next tip for more detail.) Lightroom gets the photos from all the random place you’ve stored them in the past, as well as from your camera, and puts them in a single location.
- Keyword: If we’re going to keyword images, now is the best time! During the IMPORT step, you can select all of the new images and assign generic keywords to whole groups. Keywords like Birthday, Susan’s Family, Wedding, Vacation, or Italy are all great ways to keyword.
- Backup Images: Keep reading for details on how I do this.
- Cull Images: Don’t waste your time deleting images. Let me repeat because this is a BIG MISTAKE so many newbies make. Don’t waste your time deleting images. Instead, pick your favorites by rating them with a single star. Keep reading for my best tips on culling images.
- Editing (the FUN step!): Filter your images to show only the ones you gave 1 star too. Now instead of looking at 200 images, you’re only looking at your top faves! It’s so much easier to focus on editing your best and favorite!
- Add Any Additional Detailed Keywords or Color Ratings: We will add our children’s names, their ages, or the word “blog” if Me Ra’s going to use it for a blog post, etc.
- Export: Now you can export only your favorite, edited images.
- Backup Your Lightroom Catalog: As you close Lightroom, go ahead and back up your Lightroom catalog when their pop up box offers it. This will ensure your images, key wording, edits, and collections are all safely backed up in case of electronic disaster.
Go to the next slide to keep learning the BEST way to organize your photos!
Any scholarships for organizing photos??
I recently survived a power surge that fried my iMac but I have back-ups and insurance so new computer arrives this week with new externals– I do not have
Lightroom yet but will buy it if I can learn to use it properly. New iMac is huge and I have a chance to re-organize everything….just don’t have funds because we retired and live on modest pension.
Shirley s Lange