Some Bits: Nelson's weblog

Digital photo workflow sucks

I have about 300 photos from Australia I intend to edit and put online before I leave for France. But as anyone who takes a lot of digital photos will tell you, workflow is still a huge problem. Here’s what I do now:
  • Stick flash card in a usb device, copy photos as files
  • Use Photoshop to convert raw to JPG previews
  • Sort through jpegs in ExifPro to find the good ones
  • Symlink (by hand) the raw files for the good photos
  • Lightly edit raw files in Photoshop, correcting exposure and cropping
  • Upload edited photos to Flickr
None of the automatic tools for photo workflow work for me. Either the image edit tools are bad, the database features are too limited, the software is too slow, or the UI is awful. And all of the fancy tools want to store my data in some proprietary database where I can never get at it. The workflow above is manual, but at least the data is transparent.

A couple of folks wrote to suggest I try the Adobe Lightroom beta. It’s a lightweight photo workflow tool that combines an image database with simple editing and printing tools. I like it, particularly as a lightweight tool, and think it does 90% of what I do with Photoshop only more easily. I’m looking forward to seeing this become a real product, although it’s hard to see how it will fit in with the rest of Adobe’s products.
tech • photo