Thursday 23 April 2015

Photography Workflow (Again) - Part 2

My current archive is, to my surprise, over 10,000 files for 9.57GB. I would guess at most 1,000 of them are worth keeping. From my quick experiment with Photos, importing those to it will create around 1GB of thumbnails. I have 74GB free on my Air - what am I worrying about?

So why don’t I do this?

It looks like Photos will let me create a System Photos Library where I want. (The trick is Option-Click on Icon.) So assume we create one on the NAS…
Copy Air Uploads directory to W-Archive and Archive (because both are going to be categorised by year-month later)
Where there are Picasa and W-Archive directories in common, replace the W-Archive with the Picasa directories on the Air
Delete the Air photo directories (but keep Picasa for now)
Re-group Archive and W-Archive by Month and Year (maybe a python script, maybe manually with IrfanView)
Import the W-Archive into Photos on Air - because the System Photo Library is on the NAS, it won’t clutter my Air SSD drive.
Use Photos to prune the W-Archive
Look for good photos maybe for editing in Lightroom
Print, frame and hang the things
Put them on a Flikr / Instagram account

When loading new photos:
Use Image Capture to put into an Uploads directory on NAS
Use Photos to upload pictures to the W-Archive (so we’re uploading twice. Remember not to delete the camera on the first pass!)
Run the python script to assign uploaded photos to year-month in Archive
Clear the Uploads directory.

Sis tells me she spends 4-5 hours a week sorting through and editing her weekly haul of photographs. At the moment, a week or more can go by without me taking so much as a snapshot. I will need to spend about the same amount of time working on the archive, and I started to do so, but my heart wasn’t in it. Good tools make tasks like this feel like less of a chore.

But in the end this is all just housekeeping. The old-school film guys were right: the point is to take, display and enjoy photographs. I’m not doing any of that, and what I should be asking and answering is “why not”? Doubtless I will have a bunch of overly-introspective meanderings about that in the near future.

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