I’m not the most organised person in the world. I’ll be the first to admit that. I’ve been particularly bad when it comes to keeping my image library sorted. Over the years my collection of photographs has ballooned and gotten completely out of control. The situation has been exacerbated by using different pieces of software over the years and trying different methods of rating and storing. The result of all this is that I have a huge collection of images that needs to be sorted, catalogued and tagged. The idea is to eventually get everything online on my Photoshelter hosted image library. But it’s a huge and daunting task. The biggest hurdle was just trying to figure out an approach. Figuring out where to begin was half the battle.
The one consistency in my giant mess of databases and catalogues, is that I’ve pretty much used the five star method to rate images that I like and want to keep. It’s probably not 100% accurate, but it was a good place to start. I have a big Lightroom library that contains most of my images (also a giant mess) so I exported all the five star images from that onto an external hard drive as 100% full res Jpegs. I was planning to do this anyway as a backup, so this was a handy first step. This narrowed the number of images needed to be sorted down from hundreds of thousands to just thousands. 11472 to be precise. The idea of sorting, tagging and captioning eleven thousand plus images is daunting, but there are a lot of duplicates in there and I know I can narrow that down a lot. The thing is to come up with a strategy and not get distracted. I also want to be able to do this on my laptop as I want to be able to get into the captioning and sorting whenever I get a chance. And that’s pretty much where I am now. I’ve worked out my process and the project is about to get underway. So what is that process I hear you ask?
I have decided to use Aperture for the process for a number of reasons. First of all, when it comes to sorting and rating, Aperture is fast. Stick it in quick preview mode and you can fly through images. Plus, it’s optimised for retina displays, and my weapon of choice in this endeavour is going to be my Retina MacBook Pro (also extremely fast). I don’t want to get into a Lightroom vs Aperture argument here, but I’ve been using both since both were at version 1 and I prefer Aperture for this kind of task. Anyway, once I’ve imported the photos into a clean and empty Aperture library I’ve set myself a strict step by step structure for the sort.
The first step will be a two stage culling. I’ve borrowed this process from Scott Kelby’s Lightroom workflow. I will go through the images and flag the ones I want to keep. This will be a quick fly through, marking each good image as flagged. Once that is done I’ll put the flagged ones in an album marked “Picks”. The next step is to un-flag everything and go through this again with the picks and narrow it down further. The idea is to be as ruthless as possible. Once I’ve done this then I’ll create another album with these and mark it “Selects”. It’s this set of selects that I’ll then work from.
The next step is to create a root level folder in aperture (one that’s not attached to a project) and inside that create Albums for the categories I want to sort into. So, for example, I have folders called Dublin, Landscape, Nature and so on. With these created I’ll go through the selects and drag them into one of these albums. This will probably take a while! As I’m going to be uploading the finished albums to Photoshelter, so it’s important that each image is in only one Album. I’ve come up with a way to double check this before uploading, and I’ll get to that in a minute. Once everything is in the albums, the next stage is to start key-wording and captioning. this will be the longest and most laborious part of the process. To help make sure I don’t waste any time, I’ll make use of Aperture’s colour labels to help keep track of my progress. I’ll use different labels for different stages of progress. I haven’t quite decided what these will be yet, but it will be something like: Red for completed metadata, Blue for Uploaded, Orange for “Needs some photoshopping” and so on.
Once I’ve finished this stage (which will probably take weeks) I’ll start uploading each album. Once I’ve uploaded an album, I’ll mark the photos as labelled blue. This way, when I go to the next album, if anything has been uploaded already it will be labelled, and I can just un-check it when I go to export.
Anyway, that’s about it. I just thought I’d share my thought process on this so if you were contemplating something similar you would have some ideas as to how to approach it.
I can tell that you borrowed this culling process from a Lightroom user – it’s much too long and complicated, and it doesn’t take advantage of the things that make Aperture more pleasant to use.
Two stage culling is good, but I think it can be done more easily that the way you are describing. Also, there’s no reason not to rate these images while you are looking at them – you are just creating extra work for yourself if you don’t.
Here’s how I do it: rate and flag during the first run through the images
X – anything that is out of focus, badly composed, or has no potential
1 – keep it for now, but will probably never look at it again
2 – has potential and might be nice if I ever want to come back to it and do some editing
3 – this is good and will get uploaded to my image galleries
4 – these are my favorites from a particular date, shoot, or session
5 – these are my all time favorites. 4′s usually get upgraded to 5′s sometime later when I’m looking through pictures
>> – I flag any of these pictures that catch my attention while I am rating them.
Once I go through this process, I use the menu in browser view to show me just the 2 star images, 3 star or above, just flagged images, etc. There’s really no need to create separate albums for flagged images because you can easily show just those at any time.
Your second run through can be used to increase or decrease ratings and to add or remove flags. Any rejected images can be deleted. Anything with a 1 can probably be deleted, but I let them stay since I have plenty of disk space. This is right where I’ll head if my hard drive starts to get full.
Your second goal – keywords and albums – could be done much more efficiently. You can use the File > Relocate Originals command to reorganize all the images on your hard drive. Do it by year and date using the Exif data in the images. It will take you just a few seconds to set it up, then it will take Aperture maybe an hour or so to get it done.
Don’t make albums, drag your images into them, then keyword from the albums. Keyword first. Find your first picture of Dublin, add all the keywords you want (landscape, Dublin, vacation), then use the lift & stamp tools or the Metadata > Batch Change command to add those keywords to all other similar images.
Once your keywords are done, use smart albums. Create a smart album for the keyword Dublin and all those pictures go in there. Create another one for Landscapes, and all those images go in there. Upload from the Dublin smart folder to Photoshelter. Go to the Landscape smart folder next. Continue this until you have all the images where you want them.
You can get the plugin to upload directly from Aperture to PhotoShelter. Aperture will assign a unique ID to each image that it uploads. After you upload from the Dublin smart album, you could then use the filter to hide all the images with an upload ID. This is how you know that you aren’t uploading the same picture twice.
Use Aperture the way it was meant to be used – not the way a Lightroom user would do it.
The point of the exercise though is to end up with Albums. It’s not just for key wording.
I appreciate your opinion and what works for you but to be honest, I’ve tried like that before and I think it’s actually far more complicated. It might sound easier on paper, but in the long run it’s more complicated.
I already have these images flagged as 5 stars, so there’s really not much point in going through a star process again. And I find the method you describe too complicated for such a large project. You could keep going through and adjusting ratings forever, and then you have to remember what each star rating is for. I think scott’s two stage approach is really good. I’ve used your method before and I find that it just leads to lots of images with different star ratings that don’t mean anything after a while.
In fairness, I’ve been using Aperture since day 1 so I do know how to do it the “Aperture Way” – It’s really not a Lightroom vs Aperture issue. I know I mentioned “Lightroom” in the post, and that I’m using the workflow that I’ve seen Scott Kelby use, but the software has nothing to do with it. You could use your method in Lightroom just as easily.
Its far easier to use simple albums and colour labels than go through the whole complicated process of setting up smart folders and searching for the photoshelter id’s. The idea is to make it as simple and focussed as possible. Sure I could go all out and use all the features, set up scripts to automate tasks, use custom metadata and everything but the thing is, with a large project like this you just won’t do it. Simple is the key.
Anyway, that’s just my opinion. Everyone has workflows that suit them better. I find that limiting the number of options makes you focus better, and while it might seem more complicated it’s actually much quicker in the long run. Again, just my opinion.
By the way, just to be clear – the only aspect of this that I borrowed from Scott is the two step culling process – the idea of flag, clear then flag again. The rest of it is all mine.
It’s not just simple on paper – it’s simple on the computer also. I reorganized 24,000 images this way late last year.
Like I said, everyone has a workflow that suits them better. I’m glad yours works for you. I respect that.
I tried the star rating system a while back for my many thousands of photos as well and found that I ended up selecting similar images with very different ratings over the course of doing it. Often depending on my mood or energy levels. Going back again I think “why the heck did I do a 3 instead of a 4?” or “Now I have too many 5s, they can’t all be that great.”
I think a two stage cull would work much better for me and I’d be more consistent. It is easier to decide clearly if you like something or not rather than having to spend time thinking just how much you love something or dislike a photo. It is easier to be more consistent.
I think it is the reason YouTube went from the five star rating to a thumbs up thumbs down rating…
in the end everything averages out to a 3 star; kinda useless.
I do like the idea of tagging while you go; the only problem with doing that is that over the process you always think of more tags that could be used and you often have to go through again and apply them to earlier ones. This happened to me a lot in tagging photos, even using delicious.
Thank you Thomas and Mark for your suggestions. My first problem is to get all my photos in one location. Because of an earlier drive crash and the recent high prices of drives my photos are spread over multiple drives.
That’s not including my stacks of slides that I have to scan. Any thoughts on a good slide scanner? I always had my eye Nikon CoolScan but these are not made anymore. Is there something better out there now that will run on my Intel Mac?
I’m not really sure any more about slide scanners. I have an old Canon FS4000 that is on it’s last legs (but amazingly still works after 10 years!) None of the big names makes good slide scanners any more. There are a few basic ones that are basically Digital cameras but they’re not great.
I know there are still a couple of very high end models but I’m not sure who makes them. I’ll do some more research on it.
Thanks so much,
I would appreciate hearing what you find.
I might try to find a CoolScan V and use a third party scanning application like VueScan.
Cheers, Andrew.