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Old Sep 4, 2014, 11:26 pm
  #4  
ssullivan
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: Washington, DC
Programs: DL Diamond, B6 Mosaic, AS MPV Gold, UA Gold MM, Marriott Plat, SPG Plat, Nat'l Exec Elite
Posts: 16,679
I shoot in RAW + JPEG. My camera (Nikon D7000) has two memory card slots, so one card gets the RAW, and the other, the JPEG. I mostly shoot that way because while I'm on the road, I'll often want to quickly post a photo or two each day to services like Facebook and Instagram, and having a JPEG copy of everything makes that a bit easier. When I get home, the JPEGs don't get kept.

Once home, my workflow is similar to those above. I import the RAW files into Lightroom. I've got folders organized by year, month, and then sometimes, trip (for big trips). I don't bother with renaming files in my import, since the folder structure and my somewhat obsessive organization and tagging habits in Lightroom make it easy to find what I'm looking for without renaming files. During the import, I have a preset that applies copyright information, lens corrections, a standard amount of sharpening, and a few other minor adjustments. Sometimes I'll also add some keywords that apply to the full set.

After the import is done, I usually create a collection in Lightroom for the trip, or for a portion of the trip if it's a big one with a lot of photos. My most recent vacation, to Italy, ended up with three collections, by destination - Venice, Florence, and Rome. Last year's Africa trip was a bit more, with collections for Dar Es Salaam, Zanzibar, Tarangire, Ngorongoro, Serengeti, Manyara, Johannesburg, and Mauritius.

Then I start with each collection to delete any rejected photos (I flag as rejected with the x key). After the first pass of that, I'll remove those photos, and sometimes make a second pass of what remains to see if there's anything else I want to reject. Then I tend to rank the best photos. I don't apply star ratings to everything, but usually to what I consider the best, four and five star images. I also keyword everything that remains, and edit and caption the best images that I want to post online. I also geotag anything that wasn't geotagged already (I usually shoot with a GPS encoder attached to the camera).

Finally, anything I want to post online gets added to a collection that ends up getting published to my SmugMug site. I may also create virtual copies of some images for publishing to stock photo sites I sell on. Those virtual copies go into their own collections, so that I can make captions and keywords a bit more targeted to stock sales than publishing to SmugMug. I may also adjust the editing some to be more stock-appropriate.

Finally, everything gets backed up to CrashPlan on a nightly basis. I tend to also make a manual backup to a networked hard drive that stays at home, since I travel with my laptop most weeks. Generally, I end up with three copies of all of it; one on my laptop's SSD, one on the networked drive at home, and one in the cloud on my CrashPlan account.
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