Personalize your Digital Workflow

Creating your personalized digital workflow

Photography today is so much more than just taking pictures.  Photographers are now required to be their own editor, hardware support, managing growing storage, finding files, archiving and working on them all. Every photographer should establish a workflow that is repeatable, consistent, and productive. This workflow should be well documented and evolve to accommodate changes in knowledge, software, and your shooting style.

When you are done with a shoot, regardless of the subject matter or intent, each and every shoot should be copied off your memory card and put on your computer.  Never leave the card in the camera any period of time allowing multiple events to pile up on the card.  This is an invitation to disaster! Memory cards are cheap and the size of them continues to grow making it that much easier.   Transferring the files to a computer or external hard drive after each shoot minimizes the possibility of camera card corruption and aids in better organization.  Having multiple memory cards also helps keep things somewhat separated.

A good computer is a necessary tool with any digital photographer. This tool should be equipped with as much RAM as you can afford, preferably 4GB or larger, and the Hard Drive storage should be adequate for working easily in Photoshop, probably at least a 500GB internal hard drive is a great starting point. You should also have an external Hard Drive for a backup of your files. As you create this system try to use a naming system that you can easily remember and isn’t so cryptic as to be easily misunderstood.  

Use one main directory for your photo shoots.  Within that folder are the individual shoots. Within that folder are three more folders. One labeled RAW for your RAW files. One labeled EDITED Files for any files you have edited, and one labeled WEB for any edited files that may be repurposed for later use on the web or for social networking sites.

Consider using other methods for backing up your files. You can use one of the new “Cloud” storage centers or something similar to Apple’s Time Machine. Either is a good choice and adds additional peace of mind for restoring any file that may become corrupted.

The creation of a workflow process will help you in managing your files more easily and guarantees your ability to easily retrieve any file from your past shoots without problems.