Tag Archives: previous

How Soon I Forget!

As I have mentioned in previous posts and my regular readers will know, I have been going through a process of culling old images that will never (and should never) see the light of day again.  This is part of my desire to be a lot more efficient in keeping good images and ditching bad ones in part to reduce storage requirements but also to allow me to focus back on the good shots when I need something.

One of the things it has also done is remind me of just how many good projects I have been involved with.  While many projects are one off jobs, there are quite a few regular clients that I shoot with on numerous occasions.  I have my new workflow for going through those images and creating Smart Collections in Lightroom to help me manage them.  I decided it would be helpful to go back and create similar collections for previous jobs before I changed the workflow.

I added a bunch of these collections from memory but then started going through all of the shots from the clients by searching on the keywords.  It was really surprising to me to find some of the jobs we had done together a while back that I had quite forgotten about.  I had a bunch more Smart Collections to create as a result but the outcome is that I now have better access to images from some regular clients in a more organized way than my previous searches based on keywords alone.

A second outcome of this is that I changed from using stars to identify good shots to using the Pick flag.  Since I have a mix of methods, I will be going back and reassessing which are the better shots and marking them as Picks.  Interestingly, some of the ones I had starred previously have not made it through my recent cull since a second look showed they were really not quite good enough.  Often an adjacent shot is actually better so now I need to make my selections anew.

This is going to take a long time.  I am well advanced in culling shots of civil aircraft but my military stuff has yet to be dealt with.  I’m sure we shall have some crummy days ahead which I can put to good use.  Of course, my rate of shooting is going to be going up so maybe I will be struggling to stay ahead of this for a while!