Lessons

Lesson Info

Library Setup

You guys don't mind I want to start by just getting to know your own situations a little bit better because the first thing that we're gonna talk about is whether we want to d'oh single library set up for you are multiple libraries and I think just knowing a little bit more about your businesses and what's going to work best for you will be able to help the audience and everybody watching know it's best for them. Ok, anthony want numbers so what I would love to know is tell me a little bit about what you're using after for are you currently using aperture? Yeah, I'm using amateur. Okay, great. And what do you what are you shooting? What are you using it for? Um all mostly I do photo booths and then ah, well, that's just automated so I'm just shooting the event or that thing's going on. I just have a toothy photography from the event. Ok, great. And are you currently using like one main library and putting each project into that one library? Yeah, so I just keep on my all the original f...

iles on the same hard drive and I just work from that hard drive in aperture okay, and after is just like one main library for you, you launch your aperture library as all the events in it yeah, it's. Great. Ok, perfect. So that's what? I would call a one library set up. So there are definitely a few advantages and disadvantages, too, that the one library set up is is great if you want to be able to access all of your events and stuff in the same project. But for instance, if you decided you wanted somebody else to work on a project while you were working on one as well, you can't do that, we can you can export it, have them work on it, but that's basically splitting your library into two libraries. At that point, I'm so there are some great advantages to it, however, as you grow and your library gets bigger and bigger and bigger on that can start to get bogged down. So we started taking our big individual library and breaking into years, so we did a two thousand fourteen two thousand thirteen, that kind of thing on dh. Then we started breaking into years and type of event, so we were doing two thousand fourteen weddings in two thousand fourteen engagements or or what it is and engagements together, but keeping the portrait's and the commercial stuff separate. So as libraries get bigger and bigger to get harder for aperture tio to continue the work is just doing so many other things in the background that your one little pride you're one project you're trying to work on can get bogged down by the others. So are our new set up the way that we do it now is we have a different actor library for every single event that we shoot, so depending on what you find is your do you find any advantages that you like with having everything in one library? Um, like, I guess, uh, really tried multiple library? Yeah, canada. So one of the things you you lose is a lot of the key wording being over multiple library, so if you say shoot trending of something you would actually shoot, but you shoot colored lights at it at an event, and you and you label it like colored bites so that you can put all of your color, died images and won on group, you can't do that when you have multiple libraries, but if you one main library, you can do it. So that is a big advantage for other photographers who are shooting all different species of birds, and they want to see all the blue canary severed on. They can pull up all of those in one by you think he worrying so keyword and can be hugely powerful, but also at the same time, if you're not using key wording having individual libraries could be really powerful too so it's kind of a give and take on we also talked about some of that personal stuff that you can turn on if you're using one library and keep all of your facebook stuff in one place things like that so I'm as I work through the different looks and how and how it looks maybe we can revisit what you feel like it's going to be your new workflow if you want to keep that one main library or if you are going to want to breaking into medical library become when I'll be using average you're right because I'm using ah just keep on my stuff on one portal hard drive and I'm working on two different computers are fine um so what do you find is the challenge with that? Uh maybe I'm not because I don't like average, you're managing my my files? Absolutely I completely agree with you so that you're basically saying I'm after has the capabilities of keeping the image in the aperture library on and that's considered a managed file versus referencing a file, which is what you're doing keeping all the images on a hard drive and saying my images are over here just so you know, I'm that is great I highly recommend doing referenced files versus managed, so I think you're totally doing that the right way absolutely yeah see you just came here to find out you're right how great is that? Uh ok does that said do you think as we go along you may find more if you feel like your your current situation of having one library is the way to stay or you might grow into doing multiple libraries because one of the issues are it is we had is a couple you know as we got bigger and grew and things got further down the line we were starting to need tio prune events and if they're all still in there catcher library then it's like we had stuff for two thousand and six do hasn't in seven I'm like where is this going? You know, how am I going to manage this going forward? So that might be something to think about going forward as well if you want to just do a year structure or if you want to do individual event structure okay, I think the structure is more common, which I'm more modeling after yeah ok, perfect. All right, rachel let's talk about your situation too, so I know your situation at the studio because I set it up but I don't know what you do for your own personal stuff from for boudoir for the boudoir state of scene once I obviously and using average sure I do separate libraries for each client unless I dio like a full boudoir weekend and then I just upload from a whole day and then separate each girl into separate project that keeps it organized for me so I can just go you know, maybe your weekend and then they're all there. So what do you find there, the challenges or advantages to that workflow? Because one of the challenges I would see if you have all of your girls and that like boudoir weekend is that you want tio I'm go work on an album for one of those girls, so then I mean, you could go in and work and build multiple albums yeah that's actually pretty easy, but do you find like away which weaken was may on, you know, or which weekend? Wass sarah at that kind of thing, do you find the organization structure that kind of party? Definitely I definitely kind of find myself going hunting for first and clients, and you're not outsourcing any boudoir stuff, you keep all that in house, right? Right? Okay, so what might be the best workflow for you is to have one library per year similar to what he's doing? Because if you're not doing with boudoir to it's not like weddings where I don't have the six thousand images that you're importing, you've got a smaller selection, so a whole year you may have, you know, twenty, thirty, forty shoot but they're all in the same place you go in you work on your boudoir you can't you aren't outsourcing you don't need multiple people to be working on it it's just you so that could be a really big advantage and then when you go in to look for images that are your favorite images you can easily say you know what I'm gonna I'm in a red label all of the images I want to work to show for my portfolio and then all of those will be in the same place for that year so that might be the type of library structure we want to set up for you and well I'm going to show a couple library structures and here I'll show an annual one and then I'll show individual one so we can talk about the advantages of both cool cool okay all right, so the first library that I have open right now is an engagement on this is the shoot that we did specifically for creative I've and just is a little sneak peek for you guys were going to be doing a video later on in the day to show you this shoot and show you a little bit behind the scenes so make sure make sure you guys were here for that um and basically what this library has is all the images that we shot and I've already sorted some of these in so this is just one event, and if I did their engagement I've got their highlight images are already sorted here you can see this select that need to go over to chute that edit to be edited on dh the reject images as well. So we have all three of those there and the great thing about single set up all kind of back out and she'll show you our folder structure for a second, so I have this folder here that is are the engagement bolder? And this is our standard engagement folder, so we keep this as a template that we use every single time we go in to create a new engagement. So if I've got a new a new wedding that I'm doing, I'll just set a new folder structure to show you guys on, we'll go into my desktop and I'm going to create a folder for two thousand and fourteen uh, we're going to create a new folder for two thousand fourteen, and we're calling two thousand fourteen and then in that folder, I'm going to keep a few more folders I'm going to do weddings, I'm going to dio on portrait's this is exactly the fulda structure that we have in our studio, I'm going to dio, um, commercial and that's it so under weddings will have the different events, so we would have, you know, the year first, two thousand fourteen and we'll just pick a date five won and we would put their names in it as well so it would be jane smith sounds like a good name and john smith perfect and that would be our folder structure so every time we go in here there's going to be all of the events that we shot in chronological order through the year and also so that we can see their names, you can expand out and see it that way and then in here we would copy in our engagement folder so we're going to just copy this and pasted into here and we'll copy in their wedding folder while we're at it too and we keep these is templates at the top of a wedding so we keep one here and one of these here is well, so those air always in there and we can always copy and paste them into the events, which is great and then we've got our folder structure already set up in each of these folders so it makes the organization really easy you do it once you never have to do it again you're not texting like oh, these are other originals go oh, this is this lecture kind of things so this folder structure mma zuman and just talk about it for a second I have the aperture library here and this sample apter library is a great place to start from its what you saw as well ari has smart boulders set up and ready to go so that you can start calling and editing right away right below that is a couple holders this one is the raw originals so when you're downloading cards this is where your cards go they go straight into our originals and we have a download cards sheet as well. So your download card she I'm I'll just open this once you can see it welcome to numbers. Thank you. I love numbers it's my favorite perfect and you can do this in excel or in any way that you want but we basically have our download worksheet set up so that anyone in the studio khun do it and be accountable for it and know how it works make it nice and easy. So we say the event date the cameras used the assistant, the assistance camera all information for me if I need it and then these air our cards. So these air a few of our cards that we have the first twenty of them basically and then the size of the cards and that's important because when you download images the images are going to go here like the number of images so if I put a card in and it has two hundred images in it um I dio two hundred here and then I the size of the cards already set because our card that is labeled number one is a sixteen gigs, so I never have to put that and again. And the reason I have it that that way is because I know that a sixteen gig has more than two hundred images in it. So if I see all there's only two hundred images on a sixteen nick that's suspicious, that doesn't make sense, it better be the end of the day card and that's it so that's. Why the size of the cards important on your beginning and ending? You're going to put the file name so my files names, I think there s f p and then there's there's air one on dh, then the ending one would be s f p underscored two hundred. So now that we have this card in, we download all of the cards in here, and then the number at the end here this calculates automatically, the number of the end should basically be the number of images. Not basically. It should be the number of images that air in your in your originals folder, because that's where we downloaded all the cards, too, the other thing that we check is that all of the beginning and ending numbers match so there should be a beginning and an ending to each siri's so if I'm a shooter, I shot five cards all of those cards should match up. If I have a second shooter, all of their cards should have chronological from start to finish s o we check those two things at the bottom we say you know who completed it and what data was just in case we have any questions or I mean more information I know who's accountable it's like signing it off saying how I did it, you check it three times when you have to sign it, right? Make sure it's done and then all of the images will show up in this boulder under raw originals, so they'll be listed here and then as we start to build out the aperture library once they get imported into aperture, we move them into this folder just so that we know that they're important in tow. Apter now we can see that transition as we export images are marketing images will go here preview images while facebook images that I'll go into marketing ross submitted once we're ready to go and we've done our calling our ross submitted images our highlight images will go into this folder this they stay in house, we do that it's on those are images that need to go to shoot out at it, go into this folder and get sent off to she got at it so the organization's ready for that and then right under that as the rod rejects this is a really great poll thereto have I don't know if you guys have like mass numbers of images out there like me, but if you have raw rejects and you're able to move everything into the right folder including the raw rejects when you go in a year or two later just depending on when you archive beer events you can delete the rod rejects folder we don't delete the robbery jack's wilder until we're done with the clients album design so once that I'm designing that's usually the time and they're like, oh yeah wait isn't there more pictures of that? May you know you're like oh my gosh hold on open marie jax find that may esso that is a really great time to do it, but after they're done with the album they they've gone through everything if they're going to look for anything else, they will done it by that point so we go ahead and reject the images that point. Rachel, you have a question do your clients know that you're going to be rejecting the raw are deleting all the ross like a some point my clients typically believe that I don't that I delete the rose of the rejected right away right away I keep him more for my own sanity hey right on just this is just so I don't have to have that conversation if it comes up, but these days I was actually just talking to somebody who at the last wedding that we were at, and she said that her wedding images the harvard actually deleted all of their images and it's only been like six months because they had given him a disk and everything got lost in there move like all of their stuff, and it was like it wasn't even a year later and she went back and said, hey, could I get my? And she was like, oh, I'm sorry I get rid of them and in her contract it said that so we say in our contract that we keep them up to a year that's our that's, our contract, sometimes all of me with lights and then we'll just say it's really just the images that are delivered to that they were contacted to keep up to a year just the ones that they see. But even as you know in our studio, our clients khun digitally download the images for a full year so they have all that time tio access and multiple times all that so it was a sad story, I think a question on dh then right below that is the event, so after we're done with the event in after, we will process out jay pegs as opposed to the ross they adjusted j bags and the highlights will go into this folder the rest of the images will go into all that allows us to show them the highlights first instead of them having all of the images and then they can go through the rest of them looking for that one shot that they and you know had that perfect expression that they love the most something like that that she thinks she looks the skinniest and that's always what she's looking for right? And then the last one is the products folder we keep that pull there so that we connect sport our album images into that folder but if there's anything out so like if we're doing a would mount for their waller won't we really to campus ah would texture would snap all those things that we do metal acrylic all those if we want to retouch that image will put it in products and s o that we know it's a deliberate ble does that make sense? There was a lot of information on that folder wait, you have to question all right j p j would like to know can aperture search metadata and many data and key words across multiple libraries? No, it cannot so that is a really distinguishing factor between having a single library versus multiple libraries on dh that's a really good reason tio keep several different like the same types of events in one library if you want to do that but I do still suggest doing it per year at the very most because anything beyond that can just be too much especially if it's bigger events like weddings but of course when we talk about this here creative life if those key words are attached to your image which they will be the finder can also how do you find help you find them assuring the multiple libraries that's totally true grit another great advantage of apple yeah exactly thinking ok, so we have our folder structure I showed you kind of how that works on dh then if you launch this library this aperture library I was kind of show you how it's set up so this one just based basic but it does have a lot of this smart albums already set up so your images will load into here and we've already named it zero zero there there there are bribing room engagement that's just to tell us that we want to put the year the day of the month and then the bride and groom's name here and that it's the engagement so that we know what we're looking at and then right below it these air smart albums will get into smart out was a little bit more but let me just show you a completed out of project like where it all my stuff go oh, there it is zoomed in for you guys so you'll notice the smart albums on this one I'll zoom and over here for you we've got their names and then highlights selects and rejects so over here are the are the settings for those on I'll show you what they dio may just back out so this to set up currently already sort anything that rated greater than a one star so if you have a ton of you know images that you really like, you can quickly go through one star two star three star however however you like those and then in a poll highlights so now we have forty highlights for this engagement event, which is about right that's a typically around what we do for the number of highlights and then we'll keep those in house and work on those the selects or all the images we're going to send to shoot out at it on dh we can see all the selects here and then we'll just export those incentives should got at it they'll do the color correcting adjusting for us and send him straight back even also keep these in house, of course and work on them as well the highlights or just once we put extra love and care and two we might take him into photo shop even and do a little pinch and grab skinny liquefy magic on dh, then, for the selects, will go in and do color adjustments on every single image. So if you're a one man show and doing your own adjustments in house, you would use this selects folder to keep your image is very consistent across multiple images on dh will go through all of the adjusting tools. I promise you'll be a master at it right below that is the rejects folder. So this is going to be all the images that have been rejected, and you can select. You'll be able to select all of those and move them into the rejects folder.