Processing & Organizing Images

Posted: March 29, 2012

If you use Lightroom for your images, this workflow suggested by Jeremy Brooks, might be worth considering.

One of the questions I get asked quite often is how I process and organize all my images. I have tried different tools, including iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom. Each of these tools has strengths and weaknesses. iPhoto comes preinstalled on a Mac and provides basic photo editing and organization tools. Aperture and Lightroom pick up where iPhoto leaves off, offering more advanced editing capabilities, seamless integration with third-party plugins, and much better performance when dealing with large libraries. I have been using Lightroom since January of 2010, and it has become my favorite tool for photo processing and organization.

Over the last two years, I have developed a workflow that allows me to quickly pick and process images, automatically find images that need to be processed, and locate any image quickly. My workflow can be broken down into four parts: Import, Process, Export, and Backup.

Step One: Import The first step is to import images into Lightroom. I keep my Lightroom libraries on external mirrored hard drives, and import images into folders named by the year and month, for example “2012-03 Photos” would hold photos from March of 2012.

Read the entire article Processing & Organizing Images | Jeremy Brooks for the remaining steps.