Digital Photo Management

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dziner

Guest
Since I am almost exclusively shooting in RAW mode these days, my photo library is getting quite large. iPhoto is painfully slow now so I have recently began manually transfering my files from my CF card to a Photos folder I created mocking the organization of iPhoto (year/month/date). I then edit my files with PSCS and save to yet another folder (Flickr).

This leaves me with no photo organization. I have my existing iPhoto folder, my new 2005 folder that I manually copy into, and my final edited images folder (Flickr). I'd like to cut down and organize my photos into once central location and have seen in the latest Macworld magazine iView MediaPro and Extensis Portfolio. Both of these seem pretty robust and I'm wondering if anyone else uses them and what you think. What are other people's digital photography workflows on OS X with RAW files and lots of images? What's the best way to backup your photos for archiving purposes?
 
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Tel

Guest
I'm the same, I shoot 100% in RAW but I still use iPhoto to good effect with a few Automator scripts.

Firstly, a little about my workflow, after downloading pictures using iPhoto, all my RAW files are burnt to CD's before anything else. Then I go through and decide which one's I want to use and do my post processing in Photoshop, I save all my .PSD's to a new folder and name it with the date of the shoot for any minor adjustments later, then I export the images as .PNG and save them in a folder on my desktop. Then I use Automator to back up all my origianl RAW files and PSD's to my external hard drive and back the PSD's to CD. Then I import the processed files into iPhoto.

This gives me all of my decent processed images in iPhoto in a format that doesnt slow it down at all and if I ever need to go back and change anything, then I can just go back to my external hard drive and edit them from there.

Another reason why I do this is because I only have a 60GB hard drive on my iBook and it gets filled up really quickly with thousand of 6MP RAW files.
 
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dziner

Guest
Not sure I understand your use of iPhoto. If you're using iPhoto to grab the RAW files from the camera, it puts those files into a year/month/day folder structure. Are you burning the RAW files to CD AND deleting from iPhoto? Then after editing from the RAW files, importing the resulting PNGs correct? I guess that makes sense now.

That would cut down a great deal on the file sizes that iPhoto would be handling. It always bugged me that iPhoto created JPGs of all my RAW files and duplicates of all images with every little change you would make (rotate, ect).
 
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dziner

Guest
I installed iView MediaPro last night and it seems 100 times faster than iPhoto. But now I still have a mess of directories that iPhoto created that I need to go through. I want to get rid of the "originals" folders inside all of the date folders that were created.

I'd be curious if there are any good Automator scripts. The ones I looked at didn't seem to do anything that suited my needs.
 
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october

Guest
I like Iphoto, but I feel so unorganized with it. I don't normally upload the pictures on my powerbook, so i just import to my library. This causes me to have a copy of the picture twice if it was rotated.

Is there a way to just run something in automater that will delete duplicate pictures like that? Also, I like having folders for my pictures, is there a way that I can have them uploaded into a "import" folder from the other computer, and then just drag and drop to the correct folder?

Also is there a way to hide the "library" folder?
 
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Tel

Guest
dziner said:
Not sure I understand your use of iPhoto. If you're using iPhoto to grab the RAW files from the camera, it puts those files into a year/month/day folder structure. Are you burning the RAW files to CD AND deleting from iPhoto? Then after editing from the RAW files, importing the resulting PNGs correct? I guess that makes sense now.

That would cut down a great deal on the file sizes that iPhoto would be handling. It always bugged me that iPhoto created JPGs of all my RAW files and duplicates of all images with every little change you would make (rotate, ect).

I can see how my method looks confusing in text. Let me try to clarify:

1. I have an Automator script to import all my RAW files, burn them to a CD and the import them to iPhoto.

2. I then go about using photoshop to edit the photos that I wanted to edit and I save the .PSD's to my external hard drive and also save a copy as .PNG to a folder on my desktop.

3. I then go to my iPhoto library where the originals are saved and cut and paste that into another iPhoto library that is on my external hard drive.

4. I then import the .PNG's into my hard drives iPhoto library.

This gives me a .PNG copy of all of my best work in my iPhoto library while I have all of my original RAW files saved to a CD as well as stored on my external HD as well as having all of the .PSD's on my external hard drive.
 

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