Gnurple dot Net

If you’re like me, you use the geek’s approach to digital photography which is to take a gazillion pictures and later root through them to find a handful of good ones. A self-taught (self-teaching?) amateur photographer, I know just enough about the technicals and techniques of taking pictures to be dangerous, so among the gazillion pictures are bloatloads of attempts to be creative, practise techniques and try new things.

Why so many pictures?! An alternative is, “Don’t take so many! Just take a few good ones.” If I were as good at photography as I want to become then there’d be a lot less photos sitting on my hard drive right now. Maybe in a decade or so I will be there. For right now, though, you might as well ask me to drive an 18-wheel tractor-trailer rig downtown and back it into Giant Tiger’s loading bay.

SUBJECTS and SESSIONS, ALBUMS and GALLERIES
… are words for distinguishing groups of photos. Everybody’s different, and nothing’s set in stone, but here’s an example: all my pictures from my South Dakota trip are one album. As part of our two-day tour in SD, we visited a handful of places (zoo, park, Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse, etc.). Each of these is a session^[1]. As we drove through the zoo, I took pictures of the leopards, the bears, the cubs, etc.

COLLECTIBLE PHOTOS
Most of my photos go into my photo album online or get printed, framed, and hung on the wall - though some are for something else e.g. part of a larger project like a PDF brochure or a Valentine’s note or a website. The latter get thrown away after backing up.

Here’s a look at how I get from point A (taking a metric bloatload of photos) to B (making backups) to C (an empty hard drive, updated gallery and one or two printed beauties on the wall.

A: RIGHT AWAY

A1: Pictures Galore

Try to wear out those NAND flash chips on my memory card. I can’t justify buying the latest shiny new digital camera ’til the old one dies from overuse, right? Take some run-of-the-mill normal shots, try some from different angles and heights, try some really wide, some really cropped.

A2: In-camera deleting

Review the fresh photos using the built-in screen and delete the obviously sucky ones that I KNOW are for crap. It cuts down on how often I need to dump to disk as well as how often I run out of on-camera storage. NOTE: the little screen does a poor job of showing the true picture. Don’t trust it for exposure, use the histogram function, and when in doubt, keep the picture.

A3: Copy to hard drive

I put new photos in a directory named: ~/pictures/downloads/20070402-sample_name/: a datestamp followed by a name for the photo session - e.g. “mt_rushmore_pano”, “halloween_trick_or_treating”, “halloween_party”. I’ll copy them all from the camera into the one directory, then use gqview to check that they’re all OK and group them into separate photo session directories. Any crappy shots (e.g. bad focus) get pruned.

Those are the things that I will do right away, usually on the same day I took the pictures. I’ll usually process a couple of photos right away so I can put them on my weblog or share them with friends. The other photos go untouched until I set aside some time to deal with them all.

B: BACKUP

B1 - Pre-backup: Prune duplicates

My goal here is to keep the best photo of any particular subject. The tricky part is drawing the line between subjects. For example, I have ten pictures of one subject, my cousin’s house:
(*) Three are from the front;
(*) Two from the side include the 5^th wheel camper;
(*) Three have my nephew playing;
(*) One is from farther away and includes the yard;
(*) The last has the yard with my nephew playing in it.
Though only one or two will eventually make it to my album, I will probably keep one from each group listed for a total of 5 at this point. When in doubt, keep. The goal is to keep anything which might remotely be interesting at some unknown time in the future.

B2 - Backup: Back up the remaining photos

What’s left should all be decent photos from a variety of sessions. I have a script called backup_pictures.pl that I run from ~/pictures/downloads/. It recurses through all the sub-directories and copies the pictures to my USB backup harddisk^[2], organizing them by date e.g. /mnt/usb-pictures/2007/04/03/ using the capture date from the EXIF data wherever available, else the file creation date.

B3 - Post-backup: Reorganize directories

To remind myself that this set of photos has been backed up, I move the downloads/ directory to downloaded/ and create a new, empty downloads/ directory. Now this group is ready to meet the pruning shears and I have a fresh place to dump new photos.

C: ALBUMS and PRINTS

C1: Prune any non-collectible shots

Only photos intended for my albums or for printing will remain; all those special project photos and any other clutter are eliminated.

C2: Prune to keep only the most interesting shots

The ones I keep here will be presented in my album. Of those 5 house-pictures above, I’ll keep the best one or two. Album-browsing audiences get bored and restless if there’s too many photos of a subject or too many photos in a logical group, so avoid having groups with more than, say, 30 shots. Break up large groups, e.g. “South Dakota Tour” becomes “The Zoo”, “Bear Park”, “Mount Rushmore”, etc.

C3: Standard processing (optional) and upload

Every photographer has a standard workflow. Mine’s something like this (for JPGs, not RAW): Rotate & Crop → Levels & Curves; → Whitebalance; → Noise (if needed); → Slight Sharpen. Do your thing for each session, then upload.

C4: Highlight Photos and Print Beauties

I choose a handful of the top pictures from each session for highlight photos. When a visitor checks out a particular group in my gallery, they’ll see a selection of the top few photos. If they’re interested, they can go a further step in and see the rest. These are likely candidates for printing and are the pictures I’ll pay special attention to in post-processing and/or get a little artistic with.

C5: Ahh, finished!

Double-check that they’re all uploaded or stored in their final destinations, and then wipe the ~/pictures/downloaded/ directory. Enjoy a nice Cold One™.

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[1] Actually I tend to think of albums and sessions and “logical groups” interchangeably, and you’ll find this reflected throughout the above post.
[2] Photos take up a lot of storage. I thought it might be easier and cheaper to burn each photo session to a CD or DVD. I’d feel bad wasting most of a CD/DVD, though. Instead, I will wait until my 40GB USB partition gets full. When that happens I’ll organize the backed up photos into logical groups that fit on CDs or DVDs and burn them, starting over with an empty USB space.
A One that is not Cold is hardly a One at all.

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