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File Organization and Lightroom Workflow Overview

The first thing that we need, teo, look at, um, in regards to a workflow is that we need teo go into a we gotta look at a diagram of the way that we need to work, so I'm going to pull up here on a computer, a diagram, and this is our workflow. And by the way, um, all the diagrams that I'm showing here are available to those who purchase the course, so you guys will have access to these just download him there on the course page. So, uh, don't worry about trying to write this down or screen capture you, khun certainly, you know, download it later once you have access to the course, but this is the typical workflow for the wedding photographer, and as you look at it, you can see that you start, um, with the your images in the cf card, so things are in the cf card and they're going to be brought down into the working dr, um, the working drive and we're going to talk about that let's, let's, let's, come back to the camera here and let me show you some hard drives here so that you can see w...

hat I'm talking about when I'm working um, first off we need a working drive that separated from our computer, and that doesn't matter um, who you are doesn't matter if you're a professional or if you're nonprofessional, you need to have a drive that is dedicated to photographs. So the drive that's dedicated to photographs can be a travelling drive. Or it can be a drive that sits on your desk, but either way, it needs to be something that separated from your drive. So the first drive that will look at here is what's called a tough tech duo. And so this is a traveling drive it's a small piece of gear, but it is a very special piece of gear. It's called a raid. One hard drive a raid one hard drive is essentially two drives that air tied together, but they can be removed separately when I put information onto dr number one. And, uh, what camera? We on here, let's, I'm gonna turn this, and if you zoom in on that, you can see that they're two drives there's dr number one, which is where all of the information goes that's kind of your main drive drive number two is a secondary drive. It's an exact copy of dr number one. So when I put something on dr number one, it goes to dr number two instantaneously it's happening at the same time, so I immediately have to copy it's not like I put it on this drive and then I have to remember to copy it over to this drive which is a lot of people do that to back up their stuff or they let rely on light room too when they import it to send it to two different places or worst case scenario they put it on one dr and then they have some kind of a backup program that does every week or something like that and it backs it up to another drive or they never do it but this does it instantaneously so I have to immediate copies of that drive now the beauty of this drive is that hot swappable I can while it's on so just see if I'm locked or not I can push on this little button here and I can open up this drive I have just removed the drive it's still on it's still accessed on my computer anything I write to this dr will be written to dr number one obviously not to drive number two all I need to do in order to be really really backed up is inside of my little drive case here I have a third exact copy of this drive so it's the same size I simply take this drive I plug it in like this so this is dr number three I'm gonna put this in and I'm going to do that now immediately and we gotta look at now says do you want me to add this disc? Yes, and it immediately goes to rebuild dr number three so now it's taking everything that's on dr number one and it's rebuilding it onto dr number three dr number two is now a perfect copy of what we've just done simply put it into my case and now I've got a separate drive that I can take home, so that is not at the studio or if I'm traveling and this is where this comes in handy is when I'm working on a raid one system that's this small I can take this drive with me all of my photos go on this drive and as soon as I'm done with the job, so if I'm traveling in europe or something like that and I've done a wedding, I don't want to lose those files, so I simply swap out that third drive this khun b fedex home this could be carried home and I've separated out the information, so I've done my absolute best to make sure I don't lose any files now what does that? What does that look like for the person who is just doing it for fun and just a home and it's just personal files it's simple you simply by a raid one system this one's called the tough tech duo and it's made by sea are you you can get it at being h photo on by the way anything that I've met that I'll mention here I've got a list of all of the equipment that I use on the different products that I use if you go to jared platt dot com forward slash creative live there's a list of all the gear so that'll help you find it and I've got links to stuff like that so that's jared platt dot com forward slash creative life um so for those of you who are working on personal work and it's never leaving the home or you're just you know, doing your kids or whatever at that point you simply follow the same process but instead of fedex ing this home because you're in europe or someplace you simply take this drive and put it in your safe deposit box put it in a fireproof safe separated from this drive so that should this dr be stolen from your home or should this dr be burned in a fire? This one is safe somewhere away from this drive and if you're not updating your photos all that often, you know maybe you could swap it out once a week I swap this out once a day so as I leave I simply swap the drive that means everything I've worked on that day is now duplicated and taken off site and so, that's, how I work. Let me show you a photo really quickly. And then I'll get to your question if we go to hold on, trust me. Okay. So this is actually let me show you different photo. There we go. So there's a pelican case and in that pelican case is, uh, little slots for hard drives. And so I have a backup of various things. And that pelican case is my briefcase that goes home with me every night. When I come back to the office in the morning, I bring my pelican case. And then, as I leave the office for the day, I simply swap out all the drives. Whatever backup drives I need to make and a lot of times they'll need to swap one. Because, it's, just the working dr that's changed. But if, like an archive has changed or portfolios change, they just simply swap out the drive on, then lock it up, take it home. And so I have four different backups that happen on various levels. The working dr gets changed every single day. The portfolio drive in the archive of the current year get changed once in a while on dh, then I have a little tiny small drive that backs up my laptop. And every once in a while I just back it up just just to make sure that if this were to crash I would have the ability to just kind of re install it on the new on a new uh on a new laptop without having to go through all the effort of getting everything situated and that's it. But if I take those home with me every day that I'm secure if I'm not a professional then it's just a matter of choosing an appropriate time to swap the drive out and remember it's just swapping a drive that's the most brainless activity you khun do simply grab this swap the drive I walk away and you're done and you have done all your due diligence to make sure you're backed up and then from then on out it's just play with your photos eso professional or non professional is the same process now you can either use the tough tak duo which is made by cr ew it's super tough super rugged khun travel anywhere or you could use a larger raid one system like this one this is also made by c are you on? We'll talk about this big daddy later but this is this is it it's just to drive same thing simply pop this drive out plug in the other drive but this driver is different because it is a three and a half inch drive these air laptop sized drives these are full size drives these cost less so if you want to limit the amount of cost of your hard drive and get bigger hard drives for les price if you go with a three and a half inch drive but if you travel at all or if you just want things to be small and compact then this is the way to go but it's a little more costly to get the drives themselves the units are not very costly it all but the drives themselves that's where your expenses and buying these drives some okay you had a question just a quick one thea what's the storage on the drives for the tough tech okay, so the tough tak will I don't know that it has a limit on any specific size I run a one and a half terabyte on I have two of these have a one and a half terror by on one and then this one has five hundred gigabytes solid state drives and the reason that this is my traveling drive and I keep everything solid state on the traveling drive because if I drop it I don't I want that to destroy the whole thing you take a spinning drive with a little needle in it and you drop that driver even sometimes just this far and it khun throw that little needle out of whack and then you're in trouble and so these are all solid state that way if there's any bumping or what? Because they're going in a backpack so it's really important for himto have like the best possible so they're not going to just die from like a jar or something like that. All right, so let us go back to our diagram here um let's see where is the right diagram? Yes, c r u also sells the black cases so they're super and they make him for the little ones too. Quite frankly, I wish all of my drives were this because they're so these are all, like, little tiny this is a solid state drive so you know, I'm not worried that that just that little that could just destroy a hard drive, but it won't destroy this so not that you should throw these around that I'm just saying, okay, so let's go back. So in our workflow we are going from the from our from our card, our camera card, we're going into the working drive, so that would be this thing right here or this thing right here depending on whether you're traveling or whether you're going you know, at home you're going to go into the working drive and then that whatever you're putting into the working dr is going into the spot where it belongs too many people use um pretty convoluted ways of putting stuff in and one of the most convoluted, convoluted ways that you could put images into your system is through light room because most people when they put stuff in through light room they don't know where it's putting it that's the key is knowing where your files are so let me show you if I go to a working drive and I open up that working dr you can see where my files are the right here so I'm inside the working drive and there is a job so let's go down to jackson's baseball portrait's which I haven't imported but I've put them in a folder you can see that that folder is named two thousand fifteen oh four twenty three because that's when I shot it then it's platt because I'm the client and then jackson's baseball portrait so that's the file name then if I go a little bit further over you'll see that I've gotta roth full folder and inside that raw folder is a card seok's us digital that means I dragged the card into their on by the way if you're going teo copy a card the fastest way to copy a card plug that into your computer, grab the car let's pretend this is a card if you grab the card and you drag it see that little arrow that will call that's going to make what's called a alias or a shortcut that is not copying the information, but if you hold down the option of the all key, that little plus symbol says I'm going to copy it all, so the fastest way to bring something in his plug in your card, grab the card, simply hit the option key and then dragon in and let it go, and now everything will be copied into your folder, just like that, so you don't have to worry about, like digging in and opening it up and finding the files and then highlighting the files and then copying, kidding copy and then paste just simply grab it, hold the option key and drag it. So as we go through this workflow, you're going to see then that we have in the workflow we see working dr everything goes in the job folder into the raw folder, and then I always use one card or one folder per card the reason I do that's so that if I'm bringing in fifteen different cards, I'm bringing them all in the same time because I'm actually using a two of these to these lexar card readers and so my cameras shooting two different cards so is shooting a cf card a nasty card because it's a mark three five d mark three so it's got the slots for two different cards, and so aiken draw all of those in the same same time. And if I have two of these connected, I have four cards that air ingesting into the computer at the same time. So in order to and that selects our card in order to be able to avoid cross naming. So if I have an assistant that shooting and I'm shooting and then there's this file number five and file number five if they hit at the same place in the same folder, it's going to stop the process. So I just simply make a folder per card that I'm shooting. And so if I wanted to do that, I simply go into the raw folder. Now, this only had one card to this job, so I just drag the one card in, but when I have multiple cards in a job, I go into this little thing right here changes this into a list of you once I'm in the list, view the command shift command n shift command end makes a bunch of new folders. So if I have fifteen folders, I just do this fifteen times. This would be a very long shoot, but, you know, okay, so, uh, once I've made enough folders for my shoot, um, this was a really intense portrait, that's, this is the kind of this is what people who don't know what they're doing they have to shoot this many shots to get one good shot so that unfortunately I'm not that person so I'm gonna delete these there we go but you get the concept so now I'm going teo once the images are inside of the working dr where they need to be I know where they are because I put them there do you see the difference? Don't let something else put your photos somewhere where you don't know where they are you take them you make a folder with the name of whatever it is you're doing if you're traveling so if I'm traveling and it's personal work I'm going to put in the date of the travel if it's a month long travel then it's going to be two thousand fifteen oh four zero zero which tells me there is no day it is a month the travel or it is within that month or maybe it's it's a year I would put two thousand fifteen zero zero zero zero you know it would be just that that's the whole year so that I know exactly what I've shot then I know for me it's the client if it's all personal than client section would be not all that important but maybe you could say travel and then you could say instead of a subject you could say travel dash italy something like that but come up with your own nomenclature but always follow it. For those of you who are professionals, if you do personal work, the personal work gets the same treatment as a job. There is no difference. You notice that when you look at my son, his portrait shoot which is not professional it's still following exactly the same rules. And the reason for that is that if you don't follow exactly the same rules, you will drop balls. You will lose things because you will not know what workflow my following just follow the same workflow. It works good for professionals, non professionals like all right. So once we are, um, done in ingesting the files into the hard drive, regardless of what hard driver using whether it's a desktop or its travel drive it's a separated drive. Now we need to put those images into a light room catalog. Putting him into a light room catalog is simple is telling light room to import, and I'll show you that in a minute. Once we import those images into the light room catalog, what has happened is light room looks at the folder of images. It sees all of the images it reads them. It looks at the raw data inside the images. It pulls it into its own database, and in the database it records where the file is what its name is and what data is inside it that's it that's all light room duh takes a snapshot of it it makes a little j peg for you to look at so that you can see it and then it shows it to you and if you adjust it it's not adjusting the file file stays the same nondestructive editing file stays the same and what's happening is inside of light rooms catalogue system it is then making computational notes as to I want to turn this to black and white and if I were to increase it by two stops exposure it would look like this and if I added a curve it would look like that and it's constantly making these notes but the actual photos not changing just what's inside the catalogue so it's just like it's it's brain it's that's its brain and so the same way I can see all of you and I know that you two have blonde hair you have dark hair but I can close my eyes and I can imagine what would happen if I shaved your head you got dark hair and then you got her hair and nice long blonde flowy hair right? And now I can see that picture in my head but it hasn't changed you at all okay it's just in my head in my sick brain that's what's going on but it's, what keeps me awake? Uh, just so you know, um so that's what light rooms doing it is taking a snapshot of you or of the photo and then it is switching things around and saying what ifs? The only time something changes on the photo is when you export the photo. Once you export, then it has to take the information that it decided to do to the photo, and it applies it to a new image on the way out all right, that's the only time it changes otherwise there is no way you can destroy an image, which means that you can play to your heart's content all the time because you can always go back to square one, you'll never destroy an image. In fact, it's really hard to actually lose an image in light room because if you hit the delete key, it's still asks you, do you really want to delete this? Or do you just want to remove it from the catalogue? So it's very, very sensitive about that doesn't want to lose anything, okay, so once we have it inside of the catalog, then we're going to run it through its paces and do the things that we want to do to it, and you will see that inside of the workflow here you can see inside of it working light room catalogue as you go through that you will see that the first thing we do is we build one for one previews I'll show you how to do that and by the way this is a thirty thousand foot view so don't get fearful that we're going too fast for you I'm going to give you the scope of what we're doing and then we're going to show you how to do it all so we're gonna build one for one previews so that we can see all of the information that's available to us we might have to adjust the capture times will show you how to do that we're going to select the images we're gonna organize them we're going keyword him we're gonna adjust the images we're going to reorganize the images were going to rename the images so that then they have a rational name rather than what came out of the camera then we're going to do if any kind of photo shop edits maybe that we want to do on dh then once we've done that then we can start doing other things with the images we can art export the images up to cloud so that our clients can see him or you know, post them on facebook or something like that we can make proof books because we have an entire book module inside of light room that will show you how to use we're going to maybe make some album pre designs for clients, maybe if you're traveling, maybe it's a travel book, um, that you're doing, or maybe it's an art book that you're doing? Um, I'm going to get rid of all the reject the images, the things that we didn't use, I'm going to throw him away. If it's personal work, they're going to be gone, they literally are going to be trashed if it is client work where I'm afraid that I could be sued for losing something of theirs, I will put it in what's called the rejects drive. The rejects drive is simply a drive, and I'll show you that right here, so I have a little tiny rejects drive that I brought with me right here just for show purposes. My actual read x dr is a three and a half inch, but this would be your rejects drive. Your rejects drive is a temporary solution. Simply put the rejects on this drive and wait until this drive is full. Once the drive is full, then you can delete the old rejects and start putting new rejects on it just cycles through you don't keep him forever, you keep him long enough that maybe you have a six month window that way, the client hasn't complained in six months, they're fine with it, right so I simply and that's what this big unit here is for this big unit here is my it's called a j bod system. J b o d j bod. Um and it holds four units. Each one is independent. So it's not copying things it's. Not like a raid. One system where it's making duplicates and stuff like that. And literally just four bays. If I plug something in bay one, it shows up on my computer. If I plug something in bay two, it also shows up on my computer, which allows me and I have this very unit at home or at my studio where I can plug in drives that way if I want to. I can copy stuff to the rejects drive at the same time. I'm copying stuff over to the archive. I can move stuff around if I want to. I can plug an archive driving, plus it, uh, back up. And then I can tell my system to back it up. So, it's, just a gn independent drive system. It's like taking a bunch of does anyone remember? Lucy drives those silver standing up, dr it's like having a bunch of those, but not all the chords and the, you know and have toe buy a new housing with every single one, and it cost you three times as much to buy the drive, and then you have to plug it in and plug that in, and you've got a mess accords hanging out. This is simply one drive system that sits on your desk or below your desk, and you simply just plug stuff in as needed. The beauty of it is buying a three and a half inch hoops buying a three and a half inch drive like this doesn't cost hardly anything. Buying a three and a half inch drive this same drive with housing around it cost you two to three times as much, so invest in a system like this, or even a smaller system doesn't matter what system they have. Just one one drive alone just sits on your desk, and you can plug things in and out of the the important thing is, is that you invest in a system that allows you just from then on, out to use independent drives, because that's the least cost the costly way, teo, to get your information in and out of things. Um, so once we're done removing all of the rejects, now we have, because I shoot a job that's this big, and by the time I'm done getting rid of the trash it's this big so we get rid of all those rejects, delete him and then I've got a job that's a manageable size and that job then needs to be archived because I've run it through and done all the things I want to do to it. So at that point I'm going to convert all of the final images to dmg now some people convert him dmg on the way in the light room and that's fine, but you're just converting thousands of images when you're really only going to fit in a shop using hundreds of images so I convert him at the end that way I'm not doing it at the beginning um so I convert him to dmg and the purpose of converting to dian jie is several reasons the first reason is that the dmg file type is a raw image so it's same same advantage of my cr twos of the ndf sir the whatever kind of raw file you're shooting but the dmg contains all of the information that light room has used during the adjustments and the flags and the stars and all that kind of stuff is inside that. So now instead of a raw image with a is anyone ever see a sidecar file if you've worked in bridge or photoshopped uh, camera or anything like that and you've adjusted something, then when you do that it it can't write the information into a raw image so it puts a little sidecar file so you'll have image number nine dot cr two, which is the raw file, and then you'll have image number nine dot uh, I don't remember what the xml there go xml and that is the sidecar file that says, hey, this is what I did to it. These are the edit notes problem with that is if you lose the edit notes, you lost all your work, so the dmg puts it all together, which is great, because then that file could go anywhere, and it won't lose its edit notes. You can move it around, you consent to a friend or whatever, and you will have the edit notes inside of it. When you re imported into light room or open and photoshopped, both of them will see what you did, and then all that information comes in. So if you create de ngs for all your raws at the end, then if for some reason you were to take that to another catalog, or if you were to just decide to open up in photo shop all on its own, all of the information is already there. The keywords, the stars, the adjustments, and it knows what it looked like the last time you were in a white room, so that's one adv bench the other advantages that a lot of people will ask me well is there a way to have like a big catalogue that looks at all the little catalogues and there isn't but if everything is a d n g then your entire system or bridge can search every drive that happens to be attached to your computer and all the key words are available so if I search keywords I will find deon geez that have that information in him that's the way we find our photos outside of light room very easy to find as long as they're dian g's or ps d's or j pegs or tips because those files can you can write the information directly into him it's just the raw files that light room doesn't have access to them and so it leaves them alone all right okay so we save them as d angie's um and then we're going to export them as a catalogue as well and the reason we want to export them as cattle august so that they have their own little catalog now I failed to mention at the beginning and I think that maybe it's important to go back and talk about that and that is the working catalog notice that when we put the the end month images into the working dr we then imported him to what I call a working catalog that is what you're seeing uh here that's what you're seeing here is a working catalog notice that there are more than one job in the working catalog. Each one has its name, who it was shot for and what it is so here's a travel file. So platt is the is I'm the client and it was in budapest for a workshop that we did on the next one is blaster that's, the that's, the senior and then it's a senior portrait. So we have a working draw are working catalogue where all things come in and get worked on and then they leave when they're done. It doesn't keep building, it just comes in, you work on it, you leave that's the professional version. If you're an amateur or an enthusiast or a mom taking pictures of kids, you may not have enough photos to be churning, you know images into a working catalogue and then get rid of him. Maybe one catalog is fine for you, and so if that's the case, then all images will come in tow one catalogue and they will stay there and the the bad ones will just get deleted. So they come in, delete the bad ones and it just gets incrementally bigger. The funny thing about that is, when you have a catalog that's a personal type catalog, you'll it'll get really big. And then you'll delete a lot and then we'll get really big and then you'll delete a lot and then we'll get really big and then you'll delete a lot because you just came home from like france now I went through the photos right? And if you follow that as you do a personal type of work flow than that'll work as well and in these schematics I actually have a personal workflow here let's see there it is so if I were doing personal work and I was not doing big volume then I would work this way where the images go into my drive they're getting backed up to that rotating third copy but the photos were all inside this drive and the rejects get thrown into what is that that's the toilet universal sin symbol for the toilet but everything still organized the same way it still organized the way that we organize our professional jobs? We put them into folders that tell us where they are you know that that kind of stuff still stays the same. The only difference is is that we don't need to be sending, you know, archive full jobs out because the client's going to come back to us ten years from now and want to see all the images and stuff like that whereas if we are inside of a professional work flow then we're going to look more like something like this where our files are actually hold on uh better better descriptor would be here so you have your computer you have your working drive here so there's your working dr it's being duplicated to that third copy to keep you safe all the photos are in the job folder inside of that drive and then each one has its own job right and then when you're done than it looks more like that you take all of the stuff from the job folder this jones job is going to now go into an archive drive by plugging it into one of these cr ew ew no units or whatever just plug in the archive dr of that current year two thousand fifteen um and then you just simply dragging onto that drive and then you can get rid of it off your working drive so that you have more space for the new clients because quite frankly you're working dr should always be a situation where things come in they get worked on and they leave just like they do in your working catalog okay things come into the train station they get loaded up they get changed and then they leave and then they come back in kate worked on they leave all right so um these schematics will help give you a kind of a bird's eye view as to what you should be doing all right. So um when we look at this work flow then um, we export catalogues because we brought them in to our working catalog again, I'm going to show you how to do all of this. So we're just kind of giving an idea of what we're going to talk about. So we have everything come into the into the working catalog. We work on it, and then we send it out and we're gonna send it out as its own catalogue. So now, instead of one big catalog with a bunch of jobs in it, it will be just a catalog with that one job, innit? Sent out to the archive and again, if your personal, then you may not be doing this portion of the workflow because it's already done. Okay, when you send it out, what are you sending out? The first thing we're sending out is j pegs those j pegs air going to clients if your personal it's not clients. It's to facebook it's two, maybe your eye photo library area, you know, maybe it's going onto your you know your eye, what is the apple tv or whatever it's going to those places that you like to look at photos, but for those of us who have clients it's going up, I use smugmug so it's going up too smug mug and then smugmug is what's delivering it to my client that's what showing it to the client it's what's allowing them to make prince it allows me to look at him it allows me to you can make a portfolio out of it so it can become your website so smug mug can become pretty much everything for you it's also going onto my block so I'm gonna be posting blogged posts from it I'm gonna be sending it to facebook all those types of things or where it's going to go the second place that it needs to go is it needs to go to my archive so it needs to go to the archive the archive is going to be where it sits and rests and waits for the client to come back wanting something now for me when I am working with a client I'm going to finish the shoot I'm going to get through everything that I could possibly get through without the client's intervention and that to me is considered delivered so proof prince proof books adjustments online slide shows things that I do not need the client's approval on. Then it goes to the archive and it weights in the archive because I'm going to wait for the client to come back to me for whatever else they want whether they want prince or whether they want an album or something like that it needs to sit over in that archive because if I'm waiting for them if I'm waiting for him and that, and that, um, is filling up my hard drive, I could be waiting for a lot of different clients, and at one point I'm gonna fill up the hard drive, and then I had to go buy a new hard drive. I don't ever want that to occur. I want to have that the hard drive that I'm working from needs to be as clean and as limited a number of jobs as possible, and so I'm going to get it to the archive where I wait for the client. All right? Most of my delivery, bols air done, I'm just waiting for them to approve an album or something like that. Okay, then the final place that they're going to go is to my portfolio, I got to deliver them to my portfolio because remember, I'm going to take all of these images. This isn't a professional work flow, all of them were going to go onto an archive drive, which means once I pull that archive drive and detach it from the system, I'm no longer going to see those images, so that means I need to take my favorite images and in aid to put them into a portfolio drive because the portfolio drive is always going to be attached, I'm always going to have access to my portfolio drive. So once I plug in the portfolio drive good to go aiken aiken look through anything that I've shot over the past ten twenty years but I'm only looking at the good stuff the best stuff, the stuff that I will use time all right? So that is the total workflow once it's all done and I have gotten all of my stuff to the archive and I put stuff on my port are my portfolio drive and I've sent it off to the client and I'm kind of waiting at that point I congar o to the working drive so I can go to you know this drive here and if this were the job that we're finishing I could take that job and delete it and that frees up space for the next job to come in, but part of that process is that I have to confirm the copy I confirmed the copy with a cot with a program called delta walker delta walker simply compares the folder that you copied from to the folder you copied too and it make sure everyone in zero is in place once it's done that it could say that is a perfect copy you're fine and then you could delete the first copy because the second copy is exactly the same it's important to make sure you confirm those copies all right, that is the workflow any questions about the workflow we do have a question isn't it easier and more automated to import from a card with light room with all your copyright presets etcetera? Easier no um we're confusing importing with transferring so the first processes to transfer images from the card to the computer the computer can transfer four five ten cards at a time at the same time light room khun transfer one so if I want to sit in baby sit for ten cards then yes then light room's fine but I don't want to sit around baby sit for ten cards I want to be importing four cards doing something else come back put inform or do something else now I'm a wedding photographer so I shoot a lot of images if I'm a travel photographer I would shoot a lot of images but if I am on ly shoot senior portrait sor if I only shoot artwork person like that and I only have one card then that's easy enough light room's fine if you know where the photos they're going if you don't know where the photos were going, I can guarantee you it's better to do it yourself and the only reason I mean if you if you are a master it file organization and you know where light from sending your image is great but if you don't know if you're a little iffy on it even kind of iffy on it then do it yourself so you know where they are, so you never running so many times I run into friends that, like, I don't know where any of my photos are and it's because they just plugged in a card light room popped up and they said, ok, do whatever you want to do with it, and they never told light room what to do that's, where you get in danger because you don't know where anything is, I confined where it is because I know what I'm doing, but you can't. And so if you're in that circumstance, just make sure that you're putting your photos where they go, where you want them to go, and if you don't want to use any of these hard drive systems, you just want to put him in your pictures for their great do it, but put them where they're supposed to be in your mind, so that you always know this is where they're going to be. My mom is the perfect example of someone doesn't know where anything is on her computer. She has no idea because she lets the computer do all the work, and so she has no idea where anything is, which means she can never find it, but if she would institute a program where every time I put a photo somewhere I don't put it somewhere new I put it in this spot then it would work out my wife is this way when it comes to like the house everything has a particular spot we have ah a little dongle this this little thing right here that allows us to connect and ipad to like to a tv screen or whatever there is a there is a box on a shelf for this just this just this just that but guess who can always find that dongle I'm like searching through bags or whatever and she has one of these dangles and she will always know where that is she can go and find it because there's a box for it so physically my wife is exactly the same way as I am digitally in the digital realm make boxes and things go in boxes and they stay in those boxes and they don't leave those boxes to wit everything inside of your job so if I'm going to go to a wedding than everything having to do with that wedding is going to be inside of that job so if I go to a portrait you can see that I've got catalogs I've got raw images I've got slide shows, studio interviews I've got clips of things, everything for that job even if you if you do physical contracts or whatever they go inside of this folder everything to do with the job goes in that folder. If you have notes that you're taking before the wedding, they go into this folder if you're taking if your client send you pictures of themselves, they go into that folder, everything goes in that folder so that the box you just pull it off the shelf and you can find it. All right? Okay, I got two questions for you first, and then, uh, jared, I think you just answered part of my question, your you're creating a catalogue for every client, basically, and then are you deleting it out of your working catalogue, or how does that work? So the nutshell version is all the images for that client going a folder for that client, they all go in to working catalogue, and they get worked on when they're done that that of the information goes into a catalogue into that folder with the images, and then that folder goes to the archive and gets deleted from the working dr that fairly clear, you take it out of the cat of the working catalog to yes, it'll go out of that as well, and we'll show all of that to you. We're going to go through the whole process, so no one out there, especially out there on the internet, don't move, don't move! Don't go google eyed on me yet I'm giving you the thirty thousand foot view and then we're going to go in over the next three days and we're going work on all of these processes and put it together so you can see each one of those processes happening right in front of you so you're talking about file management you've got in camera redundancy cf and esty I imagine that you're keeping it creating a different folder or box one for an sd card one for a compact flash card is that right? Well each one remember each one goes into its own car I don't care what it is okay, like I'm not I just literally pile a bunch of cards and I just ingest them all because light from sorts out what they are it knows that this is a j peg this is a raw this is a you know and this was shot at this time that was shot at this time so it figures all that out. All I need to do is get them into that a box that folder that's the raw folder where all the photos go now when I'm shooting a wedding I'm shooting a raw and a jpeg that way I can take the sd card and hand it to my assistant he can plug it into the laptop and in just the j pegs from the day and make a slide show time so I'm doing that incident, lee did you know that a small, raw image is less expensive size wise than a j peg, which means that you could actually shoot a small raw on the sd card and you get more out of it? And once you're done with the slide show, you're also done with some of the editing on the photos. And so, just recently, after I discovered that my small raws were smaller than my j pegs, I just started shooting small raws on my sd card big draws on my cf card so that now I can ingest those really quickly and work on him. Plus, if I'm shooting tethered, don't shoot ajay, so if you're shooting tethered if you tell whatever whatever card your camera is viewing that's, the image is going to be transferred with the tether, so don't make that card first. For the longest time, I thought, well, j pegs gonna be smaller than raw, so I made a j peg and then I was transferring in j peg, and it just takes for ever to transfer because his usb, too, and so I was like, oh gosh, so then I changed it to a small, raw transfers just like that because it's such a small file, but it has all the raw data, so it looks the best you can really do what you would do to it whereas ajay peg, you know it's always kind of a fake look and it's not really so yeah, this might be a little bit beyond where you're trying to take us but it looks to me like this is not just photos with the file structure everything this is like your entire business file structure yes, just to be have to be more clear on this follows this so everything goes here and at the end of the day when I archive this job I want all information about this client to be in that folder so that I can always go back in here. So you're going to come back to me three years later and say, hey, you shot my wedding on january in two thousand twelve or something like that? Um, can you find that? Yeah, what was the date of the wedding? Well, you know what, dave? Wedding wass I hope if you don't you're in trouble so so if you know that date it's very easy for you to tell me the day I don't even have to know your name, I know the day I go out there's a wedding on that day it must be, you know, whoever and so then I opened it up and I know everything that I ever knew about you got all the notes from the wedding I've got all the information I've got model releases if I had you sign model releases, I've got everything inside that file which incidently, if you're shooting stuff, were you shooting model really says your model release is need to go in here too that way if anyone ever comes to you and says, hey, you're using my photo and bubble ball and you say, oh, well, you signed a model release because you can look at the full you know, it's in your portfolio, you look at the file and you know what day it was shot, so just go back to that day in the archive and open it up there's your model release so you know that you can also put that model release as a j peg in your portfolio settle sit right next to the photo so that's also an interesting policy this is sort of a business question about how your business files integrate with a particular client so let's say free business contracts for a wedding do you do you add contracts say into the same lie true file or do you well remember light room can't see documents it's these photos and so I have a system online so I'm using online contracting system but at the very end of the job I can simply take all of that and printed out to a file and it'll print it to ah! Pdf file. And that pdf just goes into the final file into the not into your light room. File into her folder, the same folder, the same folder, so that later on, if I opened it up, let's say that that system, I'm no longer using it or whatever. If that system is no longer in use, and I'm using some other system, I wouldn't have access to all of the information from those weddings. So park a pdf of everything that you've done inside of the final job. That's. Just part of what you got to do, all right.