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Image organisation and cataloguing is important!

Everyone talks about editing, nobody talks about organizing. That's how it seems to me, anyway. Yet how you organize and manage your photographic work has a huge impact on your your creative development as an amateur, an artist and a professional photographer. Can you find your best images right now or are they buried in a sea of random experiments, duplicates and endless burst sequences? How do you make sure you don't sell the photo to two competing publishers? How do you create stories and not just single images, and how can you possibly condense tens of thousands of images into a handful of compelling personal portfolios? Photo editing is fine, but if you want to properly curate and develop what could prove to be an important body of work (if only to you), then image cataloguing is a vital skill.

Here's a selection of articles about image organizing and cataloguing, some of these are software-specific, many offer broad advice on how to manage, explore and properly enjoy the results of all your work.

Lightroom vs Photoshop: which program should you use and when?

April 15, 2022 by Life after Photoshop

Lightroom vs Photoshop, which is best? It’s not that simple, as anyone who uses them will know, because although there is some crossover (well, a lot of crossover), they have very different roles and very different strengths and weaknesses. One is not better than the other because it depends on what you want to do. […]

Filed Under: ReviewsTagged With: Adobe, Adobe Camera Raw, Bridge (Adobe), Cataloguing software, Lightroom (CC), Lightroom Classic, Organizing, Photography Plan (Adobe), Photoshop

Cataloguing software explained

March 29, 2022 by Life after Photoshop

Cataloguing software can organize your entire photo collection, but how does it work and what do you look for?

Filed Under: General, Photography explainedTagged With: Adobe, Bridge (Adobe), Capture One, Cataloguing software, Lightroom (CC), Lightroom Classic, Organizing

Image metadata explained

March 19, 2022 by Life after Photoshop

Metadata is image information stored alongside or within a photo. You don’t see it in the image, but it can be read by different software applications to help filter, sort, search or identify images.

Filed Under: General, Photography explainedTagged With: Bridge (Adobe), Cataloguing software, Organizing

The best photo editing software for organizing, editing, RAW and effects

March 4, 2022 by Rod Lawton

Choosing the best image editing software can be complicated. It all depends on what you look for most in your photo editing software. Here are 12 programs with their own distinct strengths.

Filed Under: Reviews, SidebarTagged With: Affinity Photo, Aperture (Apple), Capture One, Cataloguing software, DxO, Exposure X, Lightroom (CC), Lightroom Classic, Luminar, Nik Collection, ON1 Photo RAW, Organizing, PhotoLab, Photoshop

Lightroom FAQ: how Lightroom works, which version to use and more

March 4, 2022 by Life after Photoshop

a laptop and dslr camera on a concrete table

These are the top questions about Lightroom on the Internet right now, and some quick and simple answers which will hopefully be useful.

Filed Under: GeneralTagged With: Organizing

Exposure X7 review

February 11, 2022 by Life after Photoshop

Verdict: 4.5 stars Exposure X7 is a great all-in-one program for cataloguing your images, enhancing and retouching them and adding a huge range of evocative analog film effects

Filed Under: ReviewsTagged With: Cataloguing software, Exposure X, Organizing

Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic: same name, very different workflow

September 15, 2021 by Life after Photoshop

The name is the same, but despite the apparent similarities, these are two very different programs. So what are the key differences between Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC, and how do you choose which one to use?

Filed Under: ReviewsTagged With: Creative Cloud (Adobe), Lightroom (CC), Lightroom Classic, Organizing, Photography Plan (Adobe)

How to use Lightroom online: work on your photos in your web browser

August 19, 2020 by Rod Lawton

If you’ve got Lightroom CC or Lightroom Classic you’ve got an Adobe Creative Cloud account, and this means you can synchronise photos between the Lightroom catalog on your computer, your Lightroom online web space and your mobile device. You can do this with either version of Lightroom, but Lightroom CC is built to do this […]

Filed Under: TutorialsTagged With: Creative Cloud (Adobe), Organizing

Cloud storage for photographers: Can you access all your photos everywhere?

August 7, 2020 by Rod Lawton

Sharing our portfolio online is easy, and there are plenty of file sharing sites to make our photos accessible to you and others online. But if you want to edit and organise your photos on any device, anywhere, the choice is much narrower. Of course, you could just get an old-school portable drive.

Filed Under: General, Photography explainedTagged With: Organizing

How to organise your image catalog: some ideas

July 18, 2020 by Rod Lawton

What is the best way to organise your images in cataloguing software? You can use folders, albums, keywords, ratings, color labels, flags… but you should use just what you need. You don’t have to use them ALL.

Filed Under: General, TutorialsTagged With: Cataloguing software, Organizing

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