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workflow00.txt

For the majority of photos taken the photographic workflow can be
summarized by two steps:

1) Aim the camera in the general direction of the subject

2) Press the shutter

In the film era there was also:

3) Take the film to the drugstore to get prints made.

For many people what happens after the shutter is pressed is just as
important as what happens when it is pressed. There are three basic
goals to the photographic workflow:

1) Make sure that no photos that you want to keep get lost.

2) Select the photos to display.

3) Prepare the selected photos sufficiently well for the purpose
intended.

There is also the meta-goal:

4) Accomplish the the workflow in the shortest practical amount of time.

I am currently using Lightroom 6 and my workflow is based on what is
available there. However this is not meant as a cookbook procedure,
but as general guidelines so that you can develop something that works
for you.

Loss prevention

Ask anybody that works with computers, it is not a question of if you
will lose your stored data, only when, how and whether you can
recover. Another basic tenet is that untested backups are not
backups. If you haven't checked the integrity of your backups and that
of your restoration process, you don't have backups and you will
discover this when the aforementioned disaster occurs and you try to
recover. 

My basic loss prevention strategy is when I import my photos in
lightroom, I rename the files with the YYYYMMDD date and the file
number (also my initials).  One copy goes into my working directory on
an SSD and a second copy goes onto a different, spinny, hard drive in
case something happens to the SSD.

My file selection process will involve sorting photos into directories
(folders) and I take the risk of not making more backups until I'm
done processing.

Once I am done processing my photos, the photos are moved from the SSD
to the primary storage spnny drive (currently photo_ab), the primary
backup drive which is plugged into my main machine (photo_bu_05) and a
copy is made onto my network attached raid-5 storage.

At some point (usually when a backup drive is full) it gets removed
from the computer and moved someplace for offsite storage.  Experience
has taught that when my primary storage is full it is economically
feasible to go to a significantly larger hard drive, so all of the
files on my primary storage are copied to larger primary hard drives
and those also become offsite storage.

Note that there are some major vulnerabilities in my backup strategy,
not the least of which is that everything recent is all on the same
property and a significant catastrophe could cause me to lose
everything. I'm not doing this as a business and I figure that if I
lose my house and everything else that I own, I'm not going to worry
overmuch about the raw files of my recent photos.

Directory structure:

Some people in the Adobe Lightroom camp consider the directory tree to be
utterly irrelevant, all information of importance is in the data
base. I disagree, not the least because that makes it much more
difficult to ever change to any software besides Lightroom.

My directory structure is basically:
Half Year (for reasons this works better for me than whole years)
Month
YYMMDD_shoot
special categorizing.

So my photos of a particular car at a recent carshow are in the
directory:

.../pictures_2021b/2109/210926_car_show/jaguar/etype_white

Photos taken in July-December of 2021 are in pictures_2021b
September photos are in 2109 (YYMM)
All of my photos of the british car show are in 210926_car_show
Within that day I sorted the photos to brand and specific car

This directory structure makes it very straightforward for me to find
any photo so long as I know when it was taken.  A raw file would be
named 20210926-LRC16448.DNG and therefore a jpeg from it would be
20210926-LRC16448.JPG 

Selecting and processing the photos:

Selecting and processing are intrinsically interlinked.  If you are taking your
photos with the goal of the best final product the default previews of
all of the photos will not be something usable.  Most of the time that
I am shooting outside of the studio I will bracket my photos, usually
"nominal" and two stops under (-2 ev). Sometimes I do this for the option
recombining into an HDR image, often just to make sure that I don't
blow out highlights, or because the final image quality is better
pushing harder on the ISO than on the shutter speed.