Good workflow in photography

Necessity of good workflow.

There probably is no one thing more important in modern photography as good workflow. In the old days (just as it still is for some) when you had films you could with out much effort sort the films and arrange the library long after the images had been made. At that time most Photographers where not taking thousand of images each day, as some do now. Film also was a physical thing and mostly in some sort of box or dossier (if basic organizing was there) and there for easy to reach out for when needed. Some Photographers could even remember where in the chaos a certain image was. Most photographers had images sorted in the ring-binders by year so that made things easier and narrowed the search.

To day things are different and the necessity of well organized picture collection from the start is clear. That is because they are not physical any more and can be on Hard disks CD s DVD s or the net. It is time consuming and hard to go through all of these to find the picture of uncle Joe that you took last year.

If you-do not think of organizing your files right in the beginning it can be almost impossible to find that image. It could be any where. Not even in the house. In spite of modern technology and the search systems in computers, they can not find uncle Joe if they do not know where or what to look for. There fore you will have to give the picture of uncle Joe a tag or keyword. Some thing like a GPS point to go by for the search software. Still if the image is not on the hard disk, the software will not find it. There fore you need to give the image a row of information and bind these information into the root of the file. Thus it will be simpler o catalog and retrieve the image when needed.

It is here that DAM or cataloging software not only come in handy but are vital in finding uncle Joe where ever he is. These software are like a rescue team. Still like a rescue-team with and with out a GPS position and knowledge about what to look for. If you import your images into a software like that it will be simpler to find the image, but if you do not give the image any keywords or tags it will be like searching for a ram in the highlands to find uncle Joe.
On the other hand if you have given the image a tag, keyword and description then the software has some things to build its search on. Just like a rescue team, if they get the keywords, Ram and Uncle Joe, The search will be simpler. On the other hand if they also have Fishing lake are, Highlands, Iceland, they will know where to go and get the ram of uncle Joe.
This is the same way the dam software works, if it has some information to go by you will find the images quickly.

read more in raw pipeline by Ted dillard

It is therefore vital with images that as much information as possible travel along with them. It is not enough that you file these information in the dam software you will have to se to it that it travels with the image, preferably in its root. If the information sit in the root of the image file it will travel with it where ever the image goes and can there fore be tracked. It will be simple to move images between computers and databases and not necessary to writ the metadata(the tags, keywords and other info) over and over again.

It is therefor not an overstatement that next after choosing camera, choosing software and organizing workflow is the most important. Then you can go out and snap away as many pictures as you want.