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Import Workflow for mulitple cards, subjects

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rustyLr

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Mar 6, 2019
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Classic CC 8.2
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I'm just starting out at high volume photography, such as public events and fairs, equestrian show jumping, rodeo etc, where I end up with about 4000 shots over a 12 hour shoot (often in low light so lots of poorly focused images need to be culled).

I import the cards one at a time then create collections and move the images into the collections/folders depending on subject. I use a coloured label to tag the original import photos so I know what has been imported or not. But its early days and I still find some duplicated into incorrect collections. (Is there a way to display two windows on the one monitor to help eyeball duplicates in grid view?)

I also need to know what images I've reviewed and which are still to do, but haven't worked a way of marking them (I may not label every image so there is no marker) and there doesn't seem to be list view where you can see in an instant where you're up to.

Anyone have a favourite workflow to share?
 
You may want to use stars to denote images you've reviewed. 0 stars means "still to look at" 1 or more means have looked at. Assuming you review images by capture time or file name (from a single camera), just filter for > 0 stars (or use smart collection of the same) to find them.

I'm not sure what you mean by ".....using color labels to tag the original import photos so you know which images have been imported or not " All images you can see (and apply a color label to) by definition have been imported. So, don't know what you mean.

No double window that would be of use for this purpose.

By duplicates do you mean really exact same capture from camera or just mean two images that are very similar? If the former (i.e. you imported the same image multiple times) you should prevent this at import time but selecting the "don't import suspected duplicates" option. If the later you can use the survey view to see any number of images together, even if they are not in same folder and can't sort the grid to have them show up together. You can also throw the candidates you want to compare into the Quick Collection (letter B on keyboard) then look at that collection in the grid view to pick the best of the bunch.
 
Thanks, I'll look at those options. As I line up the imported cards in the Folders area, I may move 2-3 selections from each card into collections groupings. As I move each group I assign say a blue label to denote its been assigned to a Collection. Before this I found I was overlooking some images that had not been assigned. Where I spoke of duplication, I found some images were accidentally copied to the wrong folder, but I need to eyeball two collections at once to make sure they appear in the correct collection before deleting the images/copies in the wrong folder. The idea of all of this is not to leave images orphaned in the Folders area, because I work entirely from Collections groupings.

I'm not sure what you mean by ".....using color labels to tag the original import photos so you know which images have been imported or not " All images you can see (and apply a color label to) by definition have been imported. So, don't know what you mean.
 
You may want to use a Keyword to mark images that have been moved to a collection. You can then create a smart collection to show all images that don't have that keyword which would be the ones which got missed. You could also use pick flags or a certain number of stars as a way to mark images as having been put in a collection.

I tend to leave color labels for very temporary markings. One thing I use them for is similar to your need. In your example you could use this technique to see if the same image is in multiple collections. First clear the color labels from all images. Then select collection A and mark all the images RED. Then open collection B and if any are marked RED those are duplicates from Collection A. You can also select multiple collections simultaneously by using Shift+click. If you did this, then you could select all the collections except Collection A and any RED images that show up would mean the image was also in Collection A.
 
With any large sets of photos (hundreds and up) I treat the flags as an indicator of whether I have reviewed images, so your "lots of poorly focused images need to be culled" will get a Reject flag - making them easy to delete (Ctrl/Cmd Backspace). Ones I think I want to keep get a Pick flag, which leave Unflagged as the "still to look at" indication. That's quite a purist approach in line with how LR is designed. So I do not recommend using flags to indicate images are in a collection or ratings to indicate they haven't been looked at.
Flags-Johns.png


Following this philosophy, star ratings are for the longer term, possibly applied during this "wrangling" stage if images are strong enough, and I use colour labels quite flexibly, largely whatever I might need at that time. See this tip/article on panel end markers .

I'd recommend you use other fields too. So keyword, and use fields like Job which are meant for distinguishing events and have the extra advantage of being easy to filter in LR. Notice I've not used the word "collections" yet. That's because the guiding philosophy is to use keywords and other metadata to annotate and categorise photos, so not annotating or categorising photos using folders or collections. Folders purely for physical matters, thinking about storage, backup, and ease of being able to do a restore operation (so use a simple date-based LR default structure). Meanwhile collections are for gathering and grouping for specific needs. So if I want to easily get to a "best of 2019", "all rodeos at venue X", "3 day event", then I'll use collections.

You don't have to do things this way, and I wouldn't describe it as entirely purist, but it's taking advantage of a number of design features that make LR so good for this kind of work.
 
There's some good ideas here and its saved me a lot of time. Thanks
 
Just something I noticed in relation to checking all images are in Collections. Both the Folders and Collections give an image count, so you can quickly see or calculate whether one card has/hasn't been imported based on total count, at least for non-complex collections architectures.
 
RustyLr, if your intention is to place each image into only a single collection, you can use Lightroom's "badges" to track whether an image is already in a collection.

The badge for an image that is in a collection looks like two rectangles on top of each other. Clicking on that badge will show the name(s) of the collection(s) it's a part of.

I've attached a screenshot.
12337
 
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