Selecting, organising and saving photos - my workflow

During my coaching sessions and photo tours, I am regularly asked how I select images or how I am organised in Lightroom. From time to time, I'm also asked about backing up data, but above all about the technique of selecting images.

I would like to address these topics today - what can you expect? Ultimately, it's about how I personally select images as quickly as possible, how I deal with catalogues, collections, ratings and markers in Lightroom and finally (but much less extensively) I'll go into image export and data backup. I won't go into HOW I edit images in Lightroom - that would go beyond the scope of a blog article and I also offer coaching for that.

Quite frankly, I think there are more exciting blog topics than such more administrative/technical things, but I would like to write it down properly anyway so that I can send it via a link if necessary - and have decided to publish it on the blog.

I make no claim to completeness today - all points could be broken down into further sub-points, but I just want to give a rough impression. 

Let's start with something trivial: I only write in raw and not combined with JPEGs. The raw compression is set as follows:

• Wildlife photography: high efficiency* - i.e. a lossy compression (45mp, but only about 25mb), among other things, because in this area I often bring a very high number of releases from a single photo session; quality losses are absolutely marginal
• Landscapes, details and everything else: lossless compression

The memory cards are also stored differently depending on the area of use:

• I use two Nikon Z8s. One is connected to a telephoto lens by default (for wildlife photography); here I only write on a CFexpress card in order to utilise the maximum continuous shooting speed and a large buffer
• My second Z8 is connected to a wide-angle lens by default; here I write to 2 cards in parallel (CFexpress and SD). I've already had data loss in the last few years and if it wasn't at the expense of speed in the wildlife area, I'd like to do it there too

Now it's probably getting more interesting for you 😉The title already reveals something that works a little differently for me than for many other photographers. For many, this step would be called ‘Import and image selection in Lightroom’ - but for me, the next step takes place without Lightroom.

This is followed by a long ‘preface’ and then the actual doing is quickly described. But I'm sure that these preliminary thoughts are totally crucial for my (and your) approach to the workflow: 

In my opinion, the whole section between selecting the images and organising them in Lightroom is very much dependent on individual preferences, photographic characteristics, your own decision-making ability (how long do I need to make a selection), the exact genre as well as private and commercial circumstances. A wedding photographer, for example, has a completely different workflow than the one described above.

My preference when selecting images is speed and saving time. I'm a ‘frequent shooter’, I don't economise/stint with my shutter releases, my focus is clearly on effectiveness (bringing home the best possible image) and not on efficiency (e.g. conserving the number of shutter releases on my camera). This is very important for this ‘chapter’.

I'll illustrate this with a specific example that I've often encountered in practice:

When I come back from a sunrise photo session lasting a good 2 hours at a colony of swallows, I quickly have around 10,000 releases/images on my memory card, at least since the ‘20fps age’ when I'm after aerial shots. This is certainly the ‘worst case’ in terms of numbers, but it does happen from time to time.

I then only select the images that clearly stand out from the crowd. Using the example of terns, such images with....

1. beautiful wing posture in which individual feathers can be recognised
2. a certain colour gradient in the background (no monotonous surface)
3. calm and sufficiently cropped look/bokeh
4. good light
5. without overexposed feathers
6. good positioning towards the viewer and with a view into the open space
7. if possible, a nice gloss or white point in the eye

-> The first 6 criteria are all hard exclusion criteria

I have such ‘exclusion criteria’ - according to my personal taste - in every genre, regardless of whether it's about terns in wildlife photography or seascape photos in landscape photography, etc. This results in a ‘strict’ selection of images, or to put it in terms of the example: out of 10,000 tern images, if it was a good morning, perhaps 5 will remain.

Of course, the ratio is often not quite as severe, but take landscape photography, for example: even there, the actual selection is still a fraction in relation to the number of releases. This also depends on the personal approach - I myself often don't stick to one spot for too long, but try out a lot of perspectives and only select my favourites afterwards.

Back to the terns: I'm looking for 5 pins in a pile of hay. I'm now very practised at this. Even on location, after the photo session, I already know which situations had potential, i.e. fulfil all the above criteria that are important to me. And roughly where they were during the session. It takes me maybe 15 minutes to find the best 5 out of 10,000 images of terns in flight. I'll explain exactly how I go about it in a moment.

I would now like to revisit my original sentence - ‘My preference is for speed and saving time’. Because in my everyday life, I simply don't have enough time between an elaborate photo session and writing the corresponding blog entry - with my job and family. I'm lucky that I still manage to do these two things so often, even since the birth of our son.

This means that once I've found the few top pictures, the job is done for me. I no longer deal with the big pile of hay and don't start sorting, rating and deleting the ‘worse’ 99.9% of the pictures. This saves me a lot of time at first and costs me some money on the other hand, in the form of storage space.

Why at first? I do a ‘rough deletion’ about every six months retroactively for all sessions on one (half) day and then only according to the Pareto principle. I can plan this day much better and adjust to it. With this time interval, I can delete very quickly. Using the example of the 10,000 swallow images to around 2,000, there is still a lot of rubbish in there, but this 80% deletion hardly costs me any time. Especially in wildlife photography, this is extremely fast - using the example of a swallow shoot, I need a maximum of 10-15 minutes to reduce 10k to 2k, with a high-performance computer, without technical delays.

If I now also wanted to clean up the remaining images (in the example from 2000 to e.g. 300), this would take considerably longer. And I ‘buy’ this time by buying an extra hard disc from time to time.

Finally, I would like to mention that, in my experience, the speed of ‘80% deletion’ with a time delay of several months is really significantly higher than if you do it the first time you look at it, say in the first 4 weeks. By this time, you have become more emotionally detached from the (especially medium-quality) images and make decisions faster and ‘harder’.

Now back to my actual workflow, which you may now understand better. So I'm coming back from a photo session and have a ‘full’ memory card. How do I select the 5 out of 10,000?  As time is of the essence, I use a (freeware) tool that allows me to make the selection very quickly: FastStone Image Viewer.

Then I need the following view, from left to right:

• first the folder structure
• then the thumbnails (usually set to 5-7 next to each other)
• next to it the single image
• then an empty open folder (see the ‘thin column’ on the far right)
• looks something like this in total (of course it doesn't show a tern, but simply some current raw data from a current session 😉):

I could actually explain the following handling better in a video, but I'll try it this way:

• I now use the arrow keys to go very quickly through the rows of images in search of the pins - but only rarely image by image, but the thumbs can also be clicked through vertically, so that I always skip 5 images per click, for example (sometimes even 6-9). I pay attention to both the displayed single image and the content of the thumbs, so I have to do this at least on a 27 inch monitor
• This ‘skipping’ works very well, because certain exclusion criteria often extend over an entire period of time, i.e. over many consecutive images. So if the light or the background is not right in this example, I don't need to look at it individually. Instead, I skip 5-9 images per arrow click until the light and background match again (the maximum number of images I can skip without missing one is a matter of experience)
• On the other hand, if there is a very interesting scene, I occasionally go through every single image
• This is also practical in landscape photography and is much quicker, as I often work with bracketing here and I don't decide on every exposure level of a scene. And here, too, I sometimes spend half an hour on location working on a subject that I don't like at all later on the computer, so I don't have to click through each image individually
• If an image is suddenly available for selection, I quickly drag and drop it to the right into the empty folder (set it so that it is a copy!) and immediately continue working in Faststone again
• In the end I have - let's stay with the 10k tern images - let's say 40 image copies in the folder on the right (if I'm still not very practised here, there are significantly more for the time being)
• Sidenote: by holding down the mouse button, I can also zoom in and click through the individual images - this is sometimes an advantage when I have to take the finest differences in sharpness into account.
• I now display the 40 images separately in Faststone: this time I delete down to the very best - let's say 5 - as there are of course always similar scenes from which - in comparison - individual images nevertheless stand out. This takes maybe 2 minutes
• Now I'm practically finished: I put all the images on the memory card on a cheap external 4tb HDD and the 5 selected images go into my Lightroom import folder
• (As described above, I do a quick ‘80% deletion’ of the data on the HDD about 6 months later)

So I put the 5 images into my Lightroom import folder in Windows. If you are interested in the configuration of my computer, see also this article. I have subfolders in this folder, most of which are customised to my current blog topic. For example, one such folder is called 20240630_coastal tern series.

Now I import the (5) images into Lightroom. You can automatically rename the images during this process - there are different systems for this, but to be honest, the topic is too boring for me and I'll skip it at this point 😉

I have now added 5 images to my overall catalogue. I know the workflow of many photographers at this point, who already select the images via LR and sometimes assign stars, markers or keywords to a 2 or 3-digit number of photos from a single photo session.

Mmh, that wouldn't be for me. Firstly, the selection takes far too long for me when using Lightroom and secondly, I have a very clear view of the selection and also subtle differences, even between a top 20 and a top 5 image. That's why I would only produce a lot of waste this way and award stars that I would never be interested in again.

However, there are photographers who find the ‘fine selection’ at the very end more difficult and who struggle with a selection of similar-looking (good) images. So there is no right and wrong here.

Moving on to my workflow: I don't need X catalogues, I have ONE. However, this is divided into rough ‘collections’, which I will go into in more detail in a moment. I now edit the imported images and then do the following:

• After processing, I ‘stack’ virtual copies, denoised DNGs, HDR raw images, etc., so that only one final (processed and denoised) image can be seen at the front end
• I mark the image with stars - for me personally as follows:
• • 4 stars: my TOP 100 nature photos (simple principle: if a new one comes in, one flies out 😉)
  • 3 stars: all nature photos that are/will be published on my website (at least in the blog, it doesn't have to be a gallery picture)
  • 2 stars: good ‘other pictures’ (private, family, people, street, travel, and collages - no smartphone shots)
  • 1 star: Image has been deprioritised but not yet deleted (there are few images and they are usually only temporary)
  • A tip: there are shortcuts for everything, for the stars, for example, you only have to press the respective number on the keyboard and not take the diversions via the right mouse button
• I set various other labels (e.g. colours), for example...
• • for certain commercial purposes (I don't want to go into this in detail
  • for potential competition images
  • etc
• Then I add - depending on whether I think it is relevant for the publisher/agency - so-called IPTC data, i.e. my personal data (via shortcut) and a keywording of the image (country, subject, etc.)
• Finally, I add the image to a collection. These are links to groups within a catalogue - practically like subfolders. I have simply structured these in the same way as the gallery on my website and move (virtually speaking) each gallery image to the right place

And that's all there is to it. As a result, I only manage very few images in Lightroom. As things stand today (I'm writing this article on 21/12/2014), I have exactly 3,902 images.

Most of the time, I only display the nature photos with at least 3 stars, and then there are only 3,372, not more. And that's from the beginning of my photography (2008) until today.

I actually do all my exporting in Lightroom, just like my editing. Many photographers export via Photoshop, for example, and with an action in which the images are gradually reduced in size.

I have to say that I've always been happy with the compression and now leave it at that. Export settings, e.g. for my gallery, are up to date:

• JPEG, colour space: sRGB
• File size limit: 700k (most images will be much smaller). This is very large for the gallery and people with a slow internet connection may have problems here, but I deliberately don't want to lower the quality
• Long edge: 1600 pixels with 72 dpi
• Sharpening for: Screen
• Thickness: Standard
• And of course the addition of a watermark (PNG file)

So much for exporting a single image. What does my overall image backup look like?

I'll limit myself to backing up data to external storage media. There are also automatic backups within my own PC, which I can configure as required.

I find the external backup more interesting, because in the event of burglary, theft, water damage or a house fire, for example, the best data backup on my PC or hard drives is of no use to me if they are defective, burnt or stolen. I therefore back up the following images regularly, at least once a month:

• My entire catalogue including the embedded collections and raw images (via ‘Export catalogue’)
• All images as 16-bit TIFF file (this is pure nerdy paranoia as I don't trust Lightroom 100% due to two past ‘incidents’)
• All images as JPEG with 1600px (same settings as described above for the gallery images), I also have this folder on my mobile phone, for example

The latest version of these 3 folders is then available here:

1. on my internal PC hard drive (Samsung 990 Pro 4Tb M.2 PCIe SSD)
2. on a Samsung T9 SSD 4Tb, in our house
3. on a Samsung T7 in a ‘different location’

For point 2, I also know some photographers who use a NAS system and for point 3 you could also use a cloud solution. However, I have tried a few and have so far been dissatisfied with the upload speed, at least regular uploads with approx. 2TB.

Yes well, and that's ‘already’ it 😀

As indicated above, I'm only giving a basic outline of the workflow here, but I hope this has already helped anyone interested...

Thank you for your interest and best regards 👋

 Thomas