Lightroom workflow? General questions.

I searched but didn't find much. How do most of you handle the process? I'm new to this, but if I upload a couple hundred photos from a weekend trip, I'll go through and find the best ones (Less than 10% for me it seems, I'd also like to know what percentage of "keepers" most of you are shooting) and then edit those and export them as JPEG's to another folder. I'm not using the tags or organization features at all right now because I haven't really learned how. I think there might be a way to batch auto correct to get all of the photos 90% there but I haven't learned that either. So what do most of you do? I can't imagine anyone sitting down and editing all 200 photos.

Tons of different options obviously so I suggest trying lots to see what works best for you. I have different workflows for different size projects. Some folks sort the images before an import, you can do this using the basic desktop image viewer or tons of different programs out there at different $ points.

If you decide to sort within lightroom then for sure learn to use the different tags and filtering options (they're super useful).

I think this site has some pretty good info. Lots of different articles on here for a variety of stuff.

https://photographylife.com/masterin...ssing-workflow

As far as the keeper rate goes, depends on what activity.

Lately I've tried to press the shutter a lot less and think more before the shot so i'd say for landscapes and such I'd be closer to 80%

Anything with action is a different story, I still am a fan of the good old spray and pray. So ya, maybe around 10% in that case

Ha. Yeah, for action shots a 10% keeper rate would be awesome! Just shot 700 photos at a wakeboard comp and walked away with like 40 images I'm happy with.

For really big imports I like using the star method that I think I heard about from a blog post by Adam Barker where you go through once and star anything that is in focus and well exposed, then go through and give it a quick gut check and if you kinda like it give them two stars. From the two start group you get continuously more picky as you go up to three, four and even five stars. I usually only edit shots that make the three star list, and I like to make one set of rough adjustments for each lighting scenario and then copy and paste them onto all the photos that have the same light.

It goes pretty fast once you get the hang of it.

There are things like keeping a local version of a smaller images if you use external hard drives that I'd like to learn so I'm not always playing the game of emptying out space for me new shoots.

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Originally Posted by Bronic

If you decide to sort within lightroom then for sure learn to use the different tags and filtering options (they're super useful).

I think this site has some pretty good info. Lots of different articles on here for a variety of stuff.

https://photographylife.com/masterin...ssing-workflow

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Thanks for the link, I need to do lots of reading.

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Originally Posted by Phildo_Baggins

Ha. Yeah, for action shots a 10% keeper rate would be awesome! Just shot 700 photos at a wakeboard comp and walked away with like 40 images I'm happy with.

For really big imports I like using the star method that I think I heard about from a blog post by Adam Barker where you go through once and star anything that is in focus and well exposed, then go through and give it a quick gut check and if you kinda like it give them two stars. From the two start group you get continuously more picky as you go up to three, four and even five stars. I usually only edit shots that make the three star list, and I like to make one set of rough adjustments for each lighting scenario and then copy and paste them onto all the photos that have the same light.

It goes pretty fast once you get the hang of it.

There are things like keeping a local version of a smaller images if you use external hard drives that I'd like to learn so I'm not always playing the game of emptying out space for me new shoots.

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I like the star method. Do you go back and delete the no-star photos, or is there no reason to? I also like the idea of being able to use one set of adjustments and apply to a group of photos, if you have any articles that explain how to do that, please share.

This is a good thread about different techniques for applying global edits: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1291235

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Originally Posted by Phildo_Baggins

Ha. Yeah, for action shots a 10% keeper rate would be awesome! Just shot 700 photos at a wakeboard comp and walked away with like 40 images I'm happy with.

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Ya that may be generous. I was thinking if I fire off 10 shots in burst mode for a turn of skiing. There's gonna be one maybe two $ shots. Obviously that's assuming focus and exposure were correct

Workflow is definitely big on personal preference.
The are probably more efficient ways to do my workflow, but I do it the same every time, and it works for me, so I stick to it.

- Files go form card to external hard drive. Nothing gets deleted from cards until its on my external and the backup of that external.
- Most of my organization is on the hard drive. File Structure goes Season/Year, then Shoot/Date. ie Summer2017 is the parent folder, with 7/27/17_TigerMountainMTB 6/21/17_OlympicPen etc.
- The folder gets dragged, dropped, and imported to Lightroom (I know many may import straight through Lightroom)
- Once everything is imported do a first pass through ALL photos. If it's worth a second look at all, it gets a star. This should only take a couple of minutes, even with huge exports. Taking a blind guess, I'd say this is probably 10-20 out of 100.
- Go through the 1-star photos. Anything that is going to get edited gets 2-stars. (If it's a giant import, I might add another level of quick culling, ie pass through and label 2-stars, then anything getting edited gets 3)
- Edit the 2-stars
- Anything getting exported gets 3-stars
- Export. My most used presets are Web-res Jpeg, Full-res Jpeg, and Tiff. Each preset has the exported files go to the folder on my external that has the raws, ie >Summer2017> 6/21/17_OlympicPen>WebRes

I never delete anything unless I run out of space. Photographers are hoarders.

The question is how do you organize on your HDD with HDR.....or timelapse....or HDR timelapse.....or stitches....HDR stitches...HDR timelapse stitches....VR HDR timelapse stitches?!

If you guys upload 100 photos how long does it take you to get to them and edit? How long do you typically take per photo, assuming basic edit? Just curious.

Maybe 10-30 seconds a photo... Longer if it's particularly special...

I almost have the _exact_ same workflow as Sklar.

Here is the general workflow that works for me:

- During / after a trip, cards are dump to an 'Inbox' folder. Each card dump goes into its own subfolder to prevent file name collisions, sometimes organize them further by camera.
- Photos are reviewed in Canon's DPP software. For culling photos, DPP's Quick Check function is super fast and good enough to decide if I want to keep a photo. Any photos I want to keep are rated 2 stars.
- Unrated photos are deleted, and 2-star photos are moved/imported into my LR catalog.
- Photos reviewed & tagged in LR, ones that I like enough to edit are graduated to a 3-star rating.
- 3-star photos are reviewed again; most 3-stars are added to online galleries. Ones that stand out in this group are considered 'printable' and graduated to a 4-star rating.

The method seems to scale pretty well. In July I came back with 15,534 photos/video (542 GB) from Katmai; had them culled down to 3k within a few days, and rated/tagged/shared within a week.

You delete photos?!?!?!?!?!?! What if you need an underexposed and out of focus photo of a Nepalese bus one day and you just deleted it?

[only half kidding...... hahah]

Not enough storage space otherwise.

Ok, so four years later I’m more comfortable with editing and cataloging. Probably still not storing and sorting as well as I should with tags and labeling, but I’m mostly happy.

I have a new question though. I recently picked up an iPad Pro since my MacBook finally bit the bullet. I’m brand new to importing photos on it and so far, the way I’ve found to do it is: Thunderbolt to SD card adapter, import photos into the iOS photo app, and then select the photos I want from there to upload into Lightroom using the Lightroom app. Am I losing anything with that? Resolution or data? For whatever reason it seems a little more convoluted than on a laptop. Are the photos in the app full res.? So for example, if I now export a jpeg for printing is it as “complete” as if it were done on a desktop?

Thanks in advance, hopefully someone still reads the photo forum.

I haven’t personally done it yet, but I think you can use a hard drive plugged into the usb c port and import them into Lightroom through the files app. That should avoid any down res issues, and RAW compatibility.

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Originally Posted by Supermoon

I haven’t personally done it yet, but I think you can use a hard drive plugged into the usb c port and import them into Lightroom through the files app. That should avoid any down res issues, and RAW compatibility.

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Yeah I need to pick up a usb-c to usb converter for my hard drive, and then figure out which way is best.

Took at look at the file sizes and they are all 15-25mb-ish per photo, which seems to be consistent with what I was getting before when using the laptop, so the data is there.

Oh nice. Yeah that’s good. An iPad hard drive will fill up quick with those file sizes though

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Originally Posted by Supermoon

Oh nice. Yeah that’s good. An iPad hard drive will fill up quick with those file sizes though

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Yeah, looks like I added several gig of photos to my storage today, Took up a bunch of iCloud room too. This is not the way.


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

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Originally Posted by Supermoon

Ha. Yeah, for action shots a 10% keeper rate would be awesome! Just shot 700 photos at a wakeboard comp and walked away with like 40 images I'm happy with.

For really big imports I like using the star method that I think I heard about from a blog post by Adam Barker where you go through once and star anything that is in focus and well exposed, then go through and give it a quick gut check and if you kinda like it give them two stars. From the two start group you get continuously more picky as you go up to three, four and even five stars. I usually only edit shots that make the three star list, and I like to make one set of rough adjustments for each lighting scenario and then copy and paste them onto all the photos that have the same light.

It goes pretty fast once you get the hang of it.

There are things like keeping a local version of a smaller images if you use external hard drives that I'd like to learn so I'm not always playing the game of emptying out space for me new shoots.

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I use star ratings too for the first look, and then narrow down to five star images.

Don't forget to use Super Resolution first thing on the images you want to edit. Do that first.

Must you convert them to jpegs? How about, at least, tifs, until you know which are going to the web.

If disc space is an issue, don't let it be. I just bought two external 6T drives for $340 and copy one to the other when work is added. I should get a third to store off site in my storage unit, and copy to that once a month. You never know.

Bumping this. Anyone have any insights on good workflow / data-flow when their photos have mostly gone mobile? I'm probably taking 90+% of my photos on my phone these days.
Switched from a Pixel to an iPhone earlier this year and have been using apple's new image format which creates some compatibility issues (maybe I should switch it back to JPEG?).

My process works kind of like this:
1. Shoot on phone. Copy gets uploaded to Google Photos. Carryover my my android days--I like having a copy of photos here just so I can easily access them from anywhere and because google's search works really well (e.g. I can search "bike" and it finds pictures with not just bikes but also stuff like bike helmets).
2. Dropbox app uploads a copy to a Camera Uploads folder in my dropbox.
3. When I open Lightroom, it auto-imports all the camera uploads (and clears dropbox folder to save free space).
4. Work in lightroom as I would with a real camera.

This is good because it keeps the end results of all my shooting in one spot. Every photo I take ends up in Lightroom eventually, gets backed up, etc.


Where I find this lacking is that it all feels very removed from the phone. If I make any edits on the phone itself (e.g. to post to Instagram while travelling), those don't carry over. Ditto the other way around--if I do Lightroom work on a photo and make something stunning, I don't have that version of the photo on my phone to show anyone.

Is the answer to pony up for a premium subscription to lightroom + lightroom mobile with a bunch of cloud storage? Will that let me skip the Dropbox step for getting photos into the library and allow edits to sync between phone and desktop?

I would use Lightroom mobile for your use case. I don’t have a ton of experience with it, but it can upload and sync with your desktop app I believe.

Edit: on my iPad I can do almost all of the things I normally do on my desktop in the app, and never need to push it over. Only save it off for photoshop needs

I may need to ramp up on this workflow myself. I’m surprised to hear myself say this, but I think the pictures I’m taking with my iPhone 13 are entirely adequate for my uses, and so much easier to cart around compared to my 5D3.

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Originally Posted by singlesline

Bumping this. Anyone have any insights on good workflow / data-flow when their photos have mostly gone mobile? I'm probably taking 90+% of my photos on my phone these days.
Switched from a Pixel to an iPhone earlier this year and have been using apple's new image format which creates some compatibility issues (maybe I should switch it back to JPEG?).

My process works kind of like this:
1. Shoot on phone. Copy gets uploaded to Google Photos. Carryover my my android days--I like having a copy of photos here just so I can easily access them from anywhere and because google's search works really well (e.g. I can search "bike" and it finds pictures with not just bikes but also stuff like bike helmets).
2. Dropbox app uploads a copy to a Camera Uploads folder in my dropbox.
3. When I open Lightroom, it auto-imports all the camera uploads (and clears dropbox folder to save free space).
4. Work in lightroom as I would with a real camera.

This is good because it keeps the end results of all my shooting in one spot. Every photo I take ends up in Lightroom eventually, gets backed up, etc.


Where I find this lacking is that it all feels very removed from the phone. If I make any edits on the phone itself (e.g. to post to Instagram while travelling), those don't carry over. Ditto the other way around--if I do Lightroom work on a photo and make something stunning, I don't have that version of the photo on my phone to show anyone.

Is the answer to pony up for a premium subscription to lightroom + lightroom mobile with a bunch of cloud storage? Will that let me skip the Dropbox step for getting photos into the library and allow edits to sync between phone and desktop?

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I would def switch from HEIC to JPG.

On Instagram, if you go into Settings>> Account>> Original Photos, you can set Instagram to save a version of your edited photo (albiet low-ish res) once you post.

I've used the Lightroom app on my phone for some editing for Instagram; you can sync everything to your PC and main Lightroom file base (skipping Dropbox). AFAIK it's just the free mobile version and you can then export a full-res version of the image file to your phone to then upload in Instagram. A couple extra steps, but it preserves a finished copy outside of the Adobe Cloud that you can use for whatever. Lightroom for mobile has much better editing capabilities and options vs Instagram for working with photos if you don't want to bounce between phone and PC.

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Originally Posted by billyk

I may need to ramp up on this workflow myself. I’m surprised to hear myself say this, but I think the pictures I’m taking with my iPhone 13 are entirely adequate for my uses, and so much easier to cart around compared to my 5D3.

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I had my Z6 with me on my two month moto trip and never even pulled it out. I shot everything on my phone and GoPro.

Unless I need print-worthy images or a longer reach with a telephoto lens, the iPhone camera is basically as good, and in challenging light conditions the image processing on my phone will sometimes even give me better results than I can get on my mirrorless without lots of filters, or light modifiers.