Thomas Hawk, photographer and one of the minds behind Zooomr, posted an interesting post in his blog where he explains his process of handling the hundreds of photos taken each day. While not being exactly “rocket science” it’s interesting to check the workflow of a professional, whose archive nowadays is bigger than 5 TB, and compare it to our own because, as an amateur photographer, my organizational and handling problems are about the same, but in a much smaller scale.

My workflow nowadays is built around the fact that my everyday operating system of choice for some time has been Linux, which can be cut down to this:

1. Using F-Spot (recently I preferred it over Picasa because it’s a Gnome native application) I import all the photos in my memory cards to a Incoming folder in my storage device, I rarely delete photos. F-Spot already organizes those photos into folders with “year\month\day” structure, something I use to do by hand, so this keeps the bulk data roughly organized per date. I’ll do some basic tagging here also.
2. Quickly browse the imported photos and develop the ones “somehow interesting” with UFRaw, (I’ve been shooting exclusively in RAW for some time). I don’t have the huge amount of photos Thomas has so I don’t use the intermediate Maybe, I just rely on the different versions created by F-Spot.
3. Basic processing in Gimp, 95% of the time is things like Levels, Curves, Noise Reduction, Saturation and Unsharp Mask.
4. The output of previous step goes to a Processed folder, which contains lossless JPEG files (sometimes in a slightly smaller resolution). This is the starting point for the final touch, if any (most of the times is extra processing like a fake lomo look).
5. Pick some of the photos Processed folder and publish them to my Flickr and Zooomr accounts, usually the tagging and geotagging is done here.
6. And that’s it!

One of the differences I’ve found whe comparing both workflows, where I feel I could improve my own, is tagging and geotagging. I mostly do this in photos I’m about to publish, most probably because I’m lazy guy, but I’m facing the fact that doing it on an earlier stage highly improves the ability to browse and search larger collections, something I’m already in need as mine is reaching a point where is becoming hard to manage.

A photography workflow evolves throughout time, adjusting to someone’s needs and preferences, mine changed a lot in the last couple of years when I decided to shoot RAW and use Linux on my desktop, and this is the current iteration of mine, which will probably evolve in the future (having a decent Lightroom in Linux would be a fine reason to change it a little).

And that’s all!

My Photography Workflow [Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection]

PS – I guess this post also could be called “Photography workflow in Linux only using with Open Source tools”

[update] Nowadays my workflow is slightly different, the geotagging of all my photos is done as soon as I import them (using Geotag) along with some basic tagging, I then rely on the info in EXIF for sites like Flickr or Zoomr to set the proper location.