Culling your photos after a shoot is the only way isolate your best shots and get rid of the clutter. But does culling anxiety get in the way? If you can’t bring yourself to delete any photo, JUST IN CASE, here’s what you can do about it.
Image organising
Image organisation is the science (or art) of organising your photo collection so that you can find or search your images later. Browsing software simply shows your image folders and their contents, cataloguing software imports them into a database for faster and more complex searches, grouping in albums and often non-destructive editing.
Image organisation is a big topic. We all have very different needs, expectations and levels of understanding when it comes to keeping an ever-growing library of images organised.
If you shoot jobs for clients, it's relatively straightforward because you're likely to have a linear shoot-cull-enhance-share-archive workflow. If you keep a large stock of photos which you'll constantly re-visit, re-work and re-use it becomes a lot more complicated and you may need a database-drive tool like Lightroom or Capture One which will offer faster and more advanced image searches.
Navigating Lightroom Folders and Collections
I don’t really like Lightroom folders and collections, or at least the way they (don’t) work together in Lightroom Classic CC. Quite often, you can be browsing photos in a collection and wish you could quickly see the rest of the pictures in the same folder. Or you might be looking at pictures in a […]
Aperture users: 3 ways Lightroom could drive you mad!
Aperture users are bound to take a sneaky peek over the garden fence from time to time at its chief rival, Lightroom. Lightroom has some great editing tools and every release brings more. If only Aperture had automatic lens corrections, a Graduated Filter tool, Radial Filter, the perspective-correcting Upright tool and all the rest! By […]
8 things you need to know about managed vs referenced files in Aperture
Aperture used to be like iPhoto – all the pictures you added were stored in its internal library, a single file which ring-fenced your shots from the outside world and enabled you to move your library around as a single object. You can still do that with the current version. It’s simple and secure, but […]
How to manage Lightroom RAW+JPEG pairs
Yesterday I looked at how Aperture handled RAW+JPEG pairs and today it’s the turn of Lightroom (now Lightroom Classic). At first glance it looks as if Lightroom RAW+JPEG pairs work in much the same way, but there is in fact a significant difference: Aperture imports both and lets you choose which one to display; Lightroom […]
How to use Aperture RAW+JPEG pairs
Most high-end compact cameras and all D-SLRs will let you shoot RAW and JPEG files at the same time, and there are some good reason for doing this. You might want a JPEG straight away for posting online, for example, or for sending to other people, then use the RAW version for your proper image-editing […]
How to use Aperture Light Tables
Aperture is very good at organising images both quickly and with a great deal of flexiblity. It’s also good at displaying them in a way that helps you sort out your best pictures, and that’s not just with albums and stacks. I’m talking about Aperture Light Tables, a feature that’s often overlooked, possibly because people […]
Find out how the Aperture auto stack feature can save you hours (almost)
How did we ever manage without stacks? For those who don’t know, cataloguing programs like Aperture, Lightroom and others can group related images together and display them as a single thumbnail image or expand the stack so that all the images in the stack are visible. This has many different uses. You can keep bracketed […]
The secrets of stacking in Aperture
The ability to ‘stack’ related images is, I think, one of the single most important features of image cataloguing applications. And Aperture’s stacking system is the simplest, most effective and most versatile of all. To show how it works, I’ve set up a project with just a single image. It’s going to be a lot […]
Find your photos fast with Aperture’s Smart Albums
This is one of the strengths of an image cataloguing program like Aperture – the ability to quickly find a specific set of images out of a collection of tens, or even hundreds of thousands. It’s where the limitations of Photoshop and Bridge become so apparent – they’re fine if you want to work on […]