Flow Flux Flan

When I got my first digital camera in 2003, a hand-me-down Kodak 1 megapixel point-and-shoot with no zoom and an over-zealous flash, I relied on an outdated piece of software from 1997 called “Epson Film Factory” to manage my photo collection. It was the shell of what was to come in media management with the likes of iPhoto and Picasa; it had roll-oriented grouping, a clear thumbnail layout and various print options. I loved it, and never found anything that surpassed it until I bought my first Mac and went iPhoto.

iPhoto and I just loved working together, gulping down hundreds of 2 megapixel photos from my new Canon. I didn’t mind forfeiting my directory structure because it was so easy to find what I wanted. Everything was so easy and wonderful, until one day I decided to load a gig or two of professional photos taken of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown into my library. Suddenly iPhoto struggled and choked whenever I passed that collection.

Fast forward to now — a new camera and a new piece of software. Dealing with 6 megapixel photos, including some in the very large RAW format, I needed something new to deal with the pressures. Being an Apple user, I trialed the much heralded Aperture but it fit like a three-fingered glove. Why do I have to press here? Why is that there? The whole album/project/vault thing baffled me entirely. I’m a natural-born categoriser, and it just didn’t make any sense.

I decided to download the Adobe Lightroom beta I heard about. For a beta, I didn’t have high hopes. It loaded and presented a beautiful interface. I instantly imported a few photos after adjusting the file storage settings (I store all my photos on an external drive which is then backed up to a network drive). Everything seemed perfect to me. I loved the graphical histogram and classy EXIF data displayed beneath. I loved the simple, almost iPhoto like “Quick Develop” tools and easy editing of metadata. It did everything I wanted it to instantly, but I found it also fit my workflow beautifully.

As my photos are being copied off the SD reader, I rotate them as needed. Once they’ve all loaded I go through them just taking in what I’ve shot, making no adjustments or markings. This helps me make the decision of what will make it to Flickr, saving me from uploading twelve photos of food and three of people. On my third browse, I start to make adjustments to fix exposure and crops and hit ‘B’ on those that are on their way to Flickr. This adds the photo to the “quick collection”, something I couldn’t find an equivalent of in Aperture. This suits me perfectly as I then have a collection of just the photos I wanted to share and can easily switch between all and culled shots. I then have the chance to make further edits in balance with the other shots I’ll be uploading, kind of the rough equivalent of the final CD mastering phase of audio recording. I select all the photos in the quick collection, hit Export and I’m given a folder on the desktop of the photos ready for Flickr Uploader. Just perfect.

How could this be? How can I prefer a beta application over a 1.5 release? Adobe over Apple for ease of use?? Your milage may vary, but for my money — or lack thereof at the moment as the beta is available for free — Lightroom is the way to go. As an added bonus, it natively supports my Pentax K100D’s RAW format which Aperture does not, and can convert to Adobe’s own Digital Negative format on the fly as it imports which is a pretty nifty feature. Mind you, it’s not perfect, but it’s well on its way and you have the ability to tell Adobe what you think and make the resulting product better for everyone.

Now I’ve shared mine, what’s your preferred workflow, including software, for your digital photos?