New Year, Same Me

I don’t put any effort into making New Year’s Resolutions, mainly because I think that any flip of any calendar page is a good time to take stock of where I am. Sometimes, though, that “typical” New Year’s type of housekeeping does happen at the turn of the year. In this case, specifically, is my computer wanting to make 2016 folders for everything!

Plus, as I am (still) out of hard drive storage space, this change-of-calendar has been useful for reorganizing my workflow and archive. Over the past week or so I’ve been consolidating several Lightroom catalogs into one (but also keeping some separate). This will allow me to do all of my website stuff from one place, as well as revisit some old favorite images — and perhaps reprocess a few.

I’ve also been considering what to do with my old iPhoto and Aperture catalogs. I have roughly 12,000 images in iPhoto, and another 26,000 in Aperture, with some unknown amount of duplication within and between them. I started to move images into Lightroom, but after seeing that Aperture had lost all of the links to the RAW images, decided that I didn’t need to spend the time to re-link 800 projects just to import them into Lightroom. I’ve decided that if I need to see what I was doing in 2009 I could just import the images freshly into Lightroom. I don’t need to see where I was as a photographer then, but there are some images that I might want to re-edit with my upgraded skills (and software).

To test my new workflow (which should reduce my ongoing backup requirements by 50%), I of course did a couple of self portraits. Here’s one:

Most of my process hasn’t changed. Make a photograph, copy it to my computer twice. One goes into my “negative” file, the other goes to where Lightroom can access it. Because I can’t convert to DNG on Move (as I have learned), I Copy as DNG. Edit/output as required. Then at some point I have to remember to delete the Working Copy RAW file. I suppose I could Copy as DNG directly from the “negative” drive, but I really like having 2 copies directly from the camera’s SD card.

In my Master Catalog I have consolidated (nearly) every Lightroom catalog, so now I have just about everything I’ve photographed since mid-2012 in one place. There are exceptions — when are there not? — but in general, I think I’m in good shape for the next few months.

Good timing, too, the new school term starts in a week!