Quick Tip: Keep A “To Do” Set Of Photos
By Brian Auer • September 7th, 2007
Post-processing images can take a lot longer than capturing images. I know I certainly don’t have time to edit all the “good ones” after a full day of shooting. And once you have a couple thousand photos on your hard drive, how on earth can you expect yourself to remember which ones you wanted to come back to. I tackle these problems by creating a pool of “good ones” that I can come back to later. I use Picasa to organize my photos, so I created an album called “Process” that I toss the high-potentials into. This does four things for me.
- It relieves the stress of dealing with mass amounts of photos all at once.
- It allows me to keep tabs on the photos I like so I don’t forget about them a week or two later.
- It gives me more choices of what to process when I get in one of my moods (i.e. I have to be in the right mindset to do a black & white, color, macro, busy, simple, etc.).
- It lets me sit on things for a while and further weed out the so-so photos, so I can focus on the better ones.
So if you don’t already have a “To Do” list/pool/album/folder, you might consider trying it out. I’ve been doing this for about 6 or 8 months now, and I have over 300 images in the pool… half of which probably need to get out, dry off, and throw in the towel.
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from San Diego, California. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
Visit the author's homepage | View all Epic Edits posts by Brian Auer
I don’t maintain a ‘to do’ list of photos to edit, because I have a system worked out for that by date.
I do however keep a ‘to do’ list of photo shoot ideas that I’ve had and would like to do in the future. Sadly, I have yet to do any of them. It’s a great file for me to look at for inspiration when I’m feeling down, though.
That’s a good idea — I might have to try putting a photo shoot list together. I usually just shoot when the opportunity arises or I go out to take photos with no real direction.
I agree with the importance of first, trying to remember the shots that you though had potential, and then even trying to find them.
I use an almost similar method to go back and revisit those “possible good onesâ€.
I use Adobe Bridge C3 as my photo-cataloging tool. Besides being generous about adding keywords, I assign each photo a rating of ‘0’ to ‘5’. Fives (5) only happen after a photo has done well. Most of my good shots are rated as a 3 after the first pass. It’s difficult when you have a tough judge to get by.
Whenever I need to see these, I use a saved search function “rating 3 and higher†to examine all photos, as this search functions always looks for new entries.
I also rate (colour tag) photos when finished in a specific format’. This can be on whether they have been developed for printing or web and also where photos has been used.
Niels Henriksen
My Camera World
I really wish Picasa had a rating system in addition to its other organization tools. I can star photos, keyword them, and throw them in albums, but I can’t rate them. I’ve thought about jumping over to Bridge a couple of times so I could get better flexibility, but that’s going to be a whole lot of work.
I don’t know Picasa, but I was thinking that with keywords you could might be able to rate them it you assign keywords as follows:
For each photo assign a number from 1 to 5. If it was 3 then enter 123. If it is was 5 then enter 12345. If only 1 enter 1 and so on.
Then to search for every photo that was 3 and about just search for 3 since it will find 3, 4 and 5. This method will not work if looking for just 3s.
Just an idea that might work
Niels Henriksen
Light and Colour on Canvas
Hey, that’s not a bad idea! I didn’t think to apply ratings in the keywords.
One other thing I do with my keywords is separate my public photos from my personal (family) photos. Anything that was shot with the intent of sharing publicly gets the keyword “stock”, while photos of the kids don’t.
Nice tip. I usualy wait untill I have full disk and than process it slowly… Good think is it is only 2GB so there is not many pics.