Catalog Your Photos

For those who shoot in RAW mode, you will want to utilize a program such as Lightroom or Apple Aperture to ensure that you can catalog your images. There are other amazing apps out there like Bridge, Capture One and or Photo Mechanic to name a few but the global favorite is Lightroom. Any program that enables cataloging and, more importantly utilize the “meta tag” feature is okay in my book. You know the saying, “different strokes for different folks”.

Meta tags essentially add text data to each of your images. Say you took a trip to Alaska. You can batch tag all the images from that trip using special keywords from which you can search upon later. Typical keywords I would use would be : Alaska, Vacation, Landscape, and so on. If I took pictures of moose, bear or waterfalls then I would tag those appropriately. You may think that this is a very cumbersome process but there is a handy “batch” feature that enables you to type something once and then it applies to all your selected images; A VERY handy feature.

Now I do a lot of speaking engagements and workshops so I need to have all my images at my finger tips. If I am doing a speech or article on off-camera lighting for example then I can do a quick search and all images that I tagged as such and they will all show up for me. That really makes it easy for me to compile some favorite images that I can use for my workshop. For those who focus more on shooting, I cannot imagine having a lifetime of work that gets lost on a hard drive. For that reason alone, I cannot think of any better way than to catalog your work so that you can access your images when needed.
If you would like to see all your vacation photos then all you have to do is type “vacation” and they will appear. To be more specific you can type “Alaska” Now this only really works if you have one uber-catalog and then a bunch of sub-folders containing each day’s shoot.

For those who have a photography business, I would also suggest tagging your client’s names and photo shoot date as well. This makes things really handy if you ever need to access them.
Another awesome feature that these apps have is rating your images. You can flag images as well as give them a star rating (typically 0 to 5 stars). In my case, I tend to flag images that are my oh la la shots and are ones that I will most likely find myself displaying on my blog, website and so on. If I have client images from a portrait session or wedding then I give the images a star rating. My rating is really based upon keepers or tossers so all I need to do is give my images zero or one star. Now It isn’t uncommon for me to shoot over 15gb of images during a wedding so those zero star images that will NEVER get used are just taking up space on my hard drive. These crappy images can add up over a year or more so I make sure to delete these images after a 6 month grace period. To do this, all I do is search a particular sub-folder in my main catalog and do a global delete to the images that have zero stars and “poof” all gone.

That about does it for today’s tip. Enjoy and be inLIGHTin’ed.
Mike