If you are anything like me and you don’t cull your images, you risk drowning in a sea of duplicates, RAW+JPEG pairs, half-finished experiments, virtual copies and images that were probably not worth shooting but you never got rid of. It’s only when you get rid of all the images that AREN’T contributing anything that you can really start to work on those that ARE.
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.
How to cull images part 1: Culling anxiety, and how to get around it
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.
Lightroom CC, Lightroom mobile, Lightroom web… and how it all works
Lightroom CC is part of a whole cloud-based ecosystem that makes not just your photos but your Lightroom library and its organisation available everywhere. Here’s how it works.
Could Capture One be the new Aperture? The unexpected joys of managed catalogs
Could Capture One be the new Aperture? Like Aperture, it can create fully managed catalogs, which means all your images are stored within a single, monolithic catalog file. It sounds like madness… but is it?
Non-destructive editing and how it works
Traditional photo editing is ‘destructive’. That means every adjustment you make permanently changes the pixels in the photo and there’s no way back unless you’ve saved a copy of the original and you’re willing to start again. ‘Non-destructive’ editing is fully reversible. You can go back and undo or redo all of your editing work at any point in the future. Naturally, there’s a catch
Capture One vs Lightroom: which is best?
Capture One vs Lightroom: how do choose between these two programs? Here are they key differences, broken down section by section.
Here’s the simple photo filing system I use
This is part 1 of a mini-series on how I organise my photo library. I’m posting this because keeping an ever-growing library of photos organised is a challenge for all of us, and I thought I’d explain a system that’s worked for me for fifteen years – so I’m guessing it must be half right. […]
Can Apple Photos replace Aperture?
When Apple announced it was going to discontinue its professional image-cataloguing application Aperture, but that a brand new Photos app was on its way, many (including me) obviously hoped that Photos would go some way towards replacing our favourite application. These hopes were raised by early screenshots showing some powerful-looking editing tools. Well the dust […]
How do Capture One sessions work?
Newcomers to Capture One may be confused by its talk of ‘Sessions’, which are an alternative way of browsing, selecting and editing pictures that’s still available, even though Capture One Pro now offers Aperture and Lightroom style image catalogs. ‘Sessions’ exist because Capture One isn’t just another image cataloguing and editing tool. In fact, its […]