I’ve been doing a LOT of work on my photo organization since my last post – mainly because my camera’s shutter went out and I got the dreaded Err99 – code for “something went wrong.” Off to the Canon Repair Center it went and I hope to hear from them sometime today. As nice as it would be to upgrade to the 7D, that’s not in the works right now, so I’m hoping the repairs will come in at a decent price.
But I digress…back to how I organize and get my photos ready to use.
What works for me may or may not work for you – and that’s how it is with so much with photography – one person’s path to where they are probably really won’t fully work for someone else, but then again, parts of it might be a wonderful solution. As you may know, I’m against specializing – life is too big for me to specialize too much, though my focus for awhile might be on one thing or another, I just flat out like making images. I take them for a variety of purposes – for stock, for someone’s portraits, for sketching reference photos, for scrapbooking, to tell a story, to create a series, just a lot of reasons. That means my workflow can be a bit complex at times.
But for cataloging and copyright purposes, I have a spiral bound notebook that I’ve vertical lines on to create checkboxes. Here’s basically what it looks like:
And I just start filling it out – each of the smaller boxes gets a date in it of when I completed that part of it – or a checkmark if that task was done at some point before I started this.
I could do this part online, but I find having that spiral notebook to hold in my hand and sitting on the desk staring at me in the face helps to keep me on task and not get lost on where I last left off. Once these things are done, then I feel free to jump to the processing workflow.
But I also have a file on the computer now (using DavidRM’s software The Journal) that I enter in other data that must be tracked and kept organized for stock purposes and tracking the uses for copyright protection (once they’re registered, you have a ton more protection, but if you have a track record of each photo, all the better if when you run into a copyright infringement case). I have this on the computer because I’ll keep going back and adding in how I use various photos – even for a scrapbook page.
Here’s a look at a section of my image tracking file:
Looking at this, I see I need to add in here a column for model/property releases I have on file.
Much of what I do is probably overkill for most folks, but if you’re even considering doing ‘something more’ with your photography, starting out with good records will save you a ton of time. When I get quiet here, chances are I’m buried deep in past images working frantically to catch up on the behind-the-scenes organization.
