Sorting through all the parade photos has really made me look at my workflow. I mean, I took 1400 photos during the three hours of the parade. I'm pretty sure no one wants to see all 1400 of them. And even once I bring it down to something that approaches a manageable number, I'd have to break them into groups for posting.
Some I knew were crap when I took them. Others I knew were 'markers' of sorts for me. Pictures of the signs and things so that I could reference groups by names later. But they weren't pictures that I needed to worry about cropping and editing to show anyone.
So the first pass in my particular workflow, is on my iPad. Once I take a card full of pictures, I put all the shots on my iPad and delete the ones that are absolutely garbage. After I'm down to the shots that bear a good look, I move them onto my computer.
Once I'd done all that, I was down from 1400 to a little over 1000. So the good news is, my shooting is getting better. There was a time where 'getting rid of the total garbage' meant throwing out at *least* half of my shots. This wasn't quite a third.
Then I started sorting them out by topic. I tend not to like to blog an event simply chronologically. If people wanted to see the parade in order, they could, you know, go to the parade.
So I broke the 1000 pictures down into 16 folders. While I was sorting them out I was trying to winnow down the shots actually worth sharing, so I also had another folder of 'unsorted' shots, that were either the marker shots or duplicates or 'I thought this would be a good shot to share, but maybe not in comparison to a million other things.'
That folder was a little over 600 shots. So Now I'm at 400 that are reasonably useful in 16 folders.
But some of the folders like, "Outfits or the lack thereof" still end up with about 110 photos. I mean, this is Chicago's Gay Pride Parade. It's *all* about what people are (or aren't) wearing! Which means breaking them down into even further folders. In this case there were six, with anywhere from 5 to 30 shots on a given theme.
Which means some of those folders of 30 will either need to be broken down into multiple posts or just plain thinned out.
Which all just goes to show that any given event can contain a really ridiculous amount of work before you even get to the cropping, correcting and posting part!
So what does your workflow look like? How do you manage the ridiculous number of pictures we can now take for 'free' (compared to the days of film and developing on paper)? When you have 1000 pictures (literally), how do you manage, store and share them all?
Okay, tomorrow... more actual pictures of outfits or the lack thereof.
I guess I work similarly, but I've never taken so many of an event that I felt compelled to further break them down by category. My large amounts of photos are usually at horse shows or equestrian events, and I find I can weed out the nth shot of a bay horse over a jump in favor of a gray horse over a jump, that sort of thing. I put them in folders by day or by sub-event (like at the World Equestrian Games we went to three different events, all in the same day). There's no magic way to do it I'm sure; whatever works for you. And sometimes you probably find you don't need to finetune them that much; if you're agonizing over two similar shots it's time to dump one of them. :-) thanks for sharing your thought processes and workflow on here, I love your blog. I aspire to make my LJ as good as this blog.
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