WORKFLOW
© 2007 KenRockwell.com

INTRODUCTION

"Workflow" simply means the steps taken to churn out a photo after you snap it.

With film, our workflow is:

1.) Take film to lab
2.) Drive home (or have lunch)
3.) Drive back to lab, get film
4.) Drive home again
5.) Look at film, sort and file
6.) Drive back to lab
7.) Ask lab to make print
8.) Drive home
9.) Drive back to lab, look at print.
10.) If print looks crummy, repeat from step 7, otherwise, go home.

You get the idea. This whole process is the "workflow." For digital it's just the steps and software you find most convenient.

KEN'S WORKFLOW

Here's what I use as of March 2006 for my digital cameras:

INGEST

1.) I create a new folder on my Mac into which I'll ingest (also called download or import or copy or...) my images. I use no camera maker's software; I just copy files.

2.) I plug my D200 into my Mac and drag the files or folders from the D200 to my Mac. This copies them. The data transfer from the D200 is as fast as a card reader, and since I can transfer a gig in about four minutes it no longer makes sense to use a card reader as it did with older cameras like the D70 and D1H. Most decent cameras today, like my Casio pocket cameras, are also fast enough to avoid a card reader.

(2a.) In 2004 I used to load photos from a card reader into my Mac iBook through Nikon View 6. I set NV6 to autostart (in its preferences) so when I stick in a card NV6 starts up by magic. I use NV6 because it rotates the images once and for all from my Nikon D70 and adds all the shooting data into a caption as part of the image file. This can take a half hour if you shot 500 shots since the NV6 program slows things down compared with a direct file copy from the card. It also adds 50kB to each file's size.

If you don't care about complete rotation and having shooting data both as EXIF and a caption, just NV6 and copy the images from your card straight to whatever new folder you prefer on your Mac. This will be much quicker and save a little file space.

I make a new folder by hitting the browse button in the Nikon transfer box that comes up and name it with whatever I shot that day, or you can make your own beforehand in the Finder.)

3.) I select the name of the new folder I filled with photos in the Finder and drag it to the iView icon in my dock, which starts iView and starts it cataloging. This can take a while if there are 500 shots in the folder. You only have to wait once, since once iView creates a catalog it opens instantly the next time. The catalog opens and scans instantly, so no problem if it takes a second an image to create the catalog in the first place.

4.) SAVE the catalog that was just created in the same folder with all the images. Now the next time you want to see your 500 images everything just works instantly. If you forget to save the catalog it will take another half hour the next time you want to see what you have, and if you save it you now have instant access forever.

If you're still stuck on a windows computer then use BreezeBrowser instead of iView. BreezeBrowser needs no catalog, so you can save time by skipping steps 2.) and 3.), although since it has to read all the files it takes a while each time you open it.

5.) Rotate vertical shots. Select them, then in iView use Action > JPEG Rotate. Tis will also take a few seconds per image, and it rotates the files and images themselves. It's not simply resetting a flag. After this the file is rotated for good, regardless of the software used to view it in the future.

6.) Look though iView to see what images you like and delete the crummy ones.

7.) When you find one you like, just burn it to a CD and have it printed at Costco or CVS or Wal-Mart or Target or Sav-On or wherever. I get much better prints much cheaper, faster and easier then trying to screw with an inkjet printer at home like people did back in 2003. If you need to twiddle in Photoshop, which if you shot it right you won't, then just:

8.) Drag the image from the thumbnail view in iView to the Photoshop icon in the dock. PS opens and so does your image in PS.

9.) Mess with it in PS, save it as a high-quality JPG, burn to CD and take to the discount store for a real print on real photo paper. If you want a huge print then I burn a CD with a TIF and mail it to Calypso. Smarter people FTP it.

FINDING THINGS

To find things I merely name the folders in step 1.) above with the subject. I just search my computer for the subject and all the folders with shots of that pop up. EASY! This requires no software.

Personally I organize everything by date: a folder for each year, inside of that a folder for each month, and inside of that a folder for each dated subject.

BACKUP REGIMEN

see my page on Backups

see my page on Backing up and Working in the Field

In the Shop

Back at the shop I backup my camera files, which as you should know are as irreplaceable as film, two ways:

1.) CDs. Each month I burn that month's shooting onto TWO sets of CDs of TWO different brands of CD. I store each set in a different location in case of fire. Why two brands? Simple: no one knows today what brand lasts five years from now. This way if you have a failure in one CD you have a very different one you should hope to be OK. If you check the backups every year or so you'll know if one brand is failing and can burn new CDs to replace them. Philosophically we don't care if the CDs are lost or fail in their own right so long as we know and keep them OK, since we will only need them should our master hard drive get stolen at Starbucks. In other words, if we lose the CDs it's no problem so long as we don't lose the master at the same time.

With CDs you have a copy of the original file if the file on your hard drive becomes corrupted. You also can read CDs in almost any computer and should be able to for years, or even decades, to come since CDs are so popular. The disadvantage is that CDs are made with dyes, not solid aluminum like commercially pressed CDs, so they can fade in time and lose your data.

2.) Portable external hard drives. I have two firewire hard drives. Each month or so I copy my ENTIRE Mac hard drive to the drive with the oldest backup. I just format the destination portable drive under Mac's disc tools and drag + Opt the Macintosh HD icon on top of the destination drive icon. You could just delete everything from the external drive and empty the trash, however that takes longer.

I rotate between two external drives so if I do something stupid and kill both the master and the slave in the process that I still have the second external drive undamaged. Back when I wasted my time with windows computers I actually had both the original and destination drive somehow make themselves unreadable and unbootable. I lost EVERYTHING, but since I had that second external drive it was no big deal and I laughed about the whole thing. That's another reason I love working on Mac today: we just don't have "computer" problems like that that people blindly using windows consider acceptable.

Having two hard drives in rotation I carry the one to which I just copied to a remote location in case of fire at my house. I bring back the older drive from that location at the same time and keep it at home ready for the next time I make a backup.

The advantage of hard drives is that they store everything without the need to use multiple discs, and that they should be almost impervious to decay or fading. People smarter than I consider the magnetic plates inside to be very long lived, so long as you have a computer that can connect to and read them. The disadvantage to this is that if a file corrupts itself on your master hard drive then each backup all you are doing is backing up the corrupted file. You won't know till a year from now when you go to read it, in which case you'll thank yourself for having also the old CDs you made above!