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Lesson Info

Importing Images

Let's talk about the importing of your photos. Getting photos from your camera and your memory card to your computer. You can connect the camera itself via a USB drive. On most cameras it's an extraordinarily slow protocol system that they have built into the camera. It's not a priority, and so they kind of put in the most minimum, basic transfer system possible. And so it is probably easier and faster to take the card out of the camera, plug it into a card reader or plug it into the actual computer itself. That way the camera can be off shooting photos. You don't actually need to have the camera up on the desktop while you're downloading images. As we continue throughout this portion of the class, I'm going to be referring to Adobe Lightroom, which right now is the most popular program for photographers to view and organize and work on their images. And so I'm gonna be referring to that, but the controls that are in Lightroom are really not all that special and unique compared to the ...

world of post-production photography. And so there's likely a lot of programs that you're gonna find that have these mini same controls. This is just the one that most photographers speak at. And so with Lightroom there's usually an import option where it will go to the card that you have selected, and it will copy those images onto your hard drive. And this is a very convenient, it's a very fast and easy system, but it is a little bit on the slow side. And so if you are in a rush or you have lots of photos, there is a quicker way of doing it. And that is take the photos and physically drag and drop them into the folder that you want them. And so, what's happening here is that you're not involving Lightroom. Lightroom doesn't even know about this and it's not going through the whole Lightroom rigmarole. It's kind of like the Lightroom person is checking everyone in, and adding a little bit of information about it. At that point if you wanna work with Lightroom, you can go to Lightroom and look into their Add option where it just says, "Add this folder to My collection of images." And then it doesn't need to move all the images around. They're already in the right location. And so, I've used this technique if I've had a folder. Say, for instance, I've gone out and I've shot one or 2,000 photos on a day, and I wanna get them into Lightroom as quickly as possible. It'll save you about 25% of the time. But to be honest with you, I don't use this because most of the time I go out and I shoot 100 photos, and the time difference isn't that big. But if you do have a really big day or big jobs that's a shortcut. Many people don't know this with Lightroom, and probably some other programs as well is you can have multiple cards plugged into multiple card readers. You can select all of those and have all of the photos brought in at the same time. And so if you shoot on multiple cameras, if you just have a really big day that go through a number of cards, you can bring these all in simultaneously. That way you can have this working while you're off eating dinner or something. And so, don't be sitting there babysitting it doing one card and then the next card. But you do have to have the ability to plug in more than one card into your computer at the same time. Lexar for instance has this professional workflow hub where you can slip in different units according to the type of card that you have. You can have a whole bunch of compact flash cards and stick in one in each slot. And this would be more for a high-end professional who is on a routine basis importing a lot of photos at exactly the same time. So there are solutions out there for that. Next up, let's talk about organizing. Working on our images and getting them in an order that we can find them. When you download your images, I don't like to admit it but one of the options is you can be done right then. You've downloaded your images, you can walked away and say, "I have done my job." They are in the computer. All right? And that's kind of nice because, boy, that doesn't take very long at all. All you've done is download your images. So, that saves a lot of time. And every image that you shot, no matter how good or how bad it was, don't need to worry about it. You can always go back, and you can always find it. So there are some really nice things about not really doing any editing at all. All right? As far as at least the culling process. However, if you have all of these files that you really should delete, and they're just hanging around on your computer, that is a lot of dead weight that you're gonna constantly be carrying with you throughout the rest of your digital life. Just gonna be weighing down. It's also gonna make stuff really hard to find when you have more stuff to go through. You're gonna be, "Where is it? I know it's in here somewhere." And if you have fewer things, it's easier to find what you're looking for. You're gonna need to buy more hard drives And whenever you wanna back up a whole system, it's gonna take longer and it's gonna require more equipment to do that. All right, so now let's say you're gonna do a little bit of organizing. You're gonna delete some of the worst, you might need to do a little bit of a star rating things like that. It's gonna make your whole computer system run a little bit faster at least on the hard drive. It's gonna make things easier to find cause there's less stuff on there. The third one here. Learn from your mistakes. When you look at what you did, you're gonna start judging how good a job you did. And you will hopefully start learning from your mistakes. "Ah, I should've changed that flash exposure compensation to minus one. This is overexposed. I'm gonna fix that next time around." This is the process, the learning cycle where you get to be a better photographer. And this is an important part of the cycle, that a lot of people just kind of wanna side step cause it's not a lot of fun. I mean this is getting back our report card. How did I do? Did I do good or did I do bad on this particular shoot? But let's admit this is a time-consuming process that's not the most enjoyable thing in the world for some people. Sitting down, "Oh, I've gotta go through 2,000 images and figure out what I'm gonna keep and what I'm not gonna keep." There's a lot of hard decisions to be made in here. There's a lot of tools that you can use for organizing this whole system just to keep things in order. So, we're gonna talk about all of these different tools that are available. These are available in Lightroom, but they're available in a lot of other programs as well. Let's talk first about the actual files and the folders that you're gonna put those files in. So there should probably be a folder on you're computer where you store all your photographic stuff. And a lot of times it's called the pictures folder, which is perfectly fine if you wanna different name for it, feel free to rename it. The problem is is that you do not want to just dump everything into this one folder. Dumping too many folders into a folder, oh, great. Look at this. We're gonna have a problem here, folks. I can tell this right now. Oh, no. What's going on? (laughter) No, no we don't wanna hard drive format right now. You don't wanna have these sorts of problems, okay? That's what happens when you store too much on there. And I have a theory, that there's a certain number of folders or files that you should have in one location. If you only have one or two, it kind of doesn't make sense. There's not enough in there. And somewhere around 10, 25, 50, 100 items in a particular location is reasonable to deal with. Having a thousand folders within a folder, it's just too spread out. It's gonna take too long to scroll through and find things. So, if you can group things in a 10 to 100 number grouping, that is something that our human brains can kind of sort through. Just kind of think about a list of movies. You wanna go see a movie, and there's a list of movies. Would you like to see a list of a thousand movies? That would be really difficult. Can we group them into genres of movies at 50 at a time? That would be a little bit easier to scan through and comprehend. So, inside of a photography folder, at least for those of you with Lightroom, and this is a little bit more particular to Lightroom, is there should be a folder where you're gonna keep all of your photos. And they'll be another folder where there is all of your catalog information, holding information about your catalog. And some other programs work in a very similar manner. And this is kind of the backend database which is controlling what's going on with it. In Lightroom in particular, there's one folder that is the catalog which is all of the data about your photographs that it's keeping. There's a couple other things. There's a preview, there's a preview folder in there. Not a folder but a set of data on the preview. There's a bunch of other folders which are a lot about your presets, how you have Lightroom set up. And then there's gonna be a back up which is as of a copy of your actual catalog because the catalog is really so small and file sized. And that is something that Lightroom creates and does on it's own. And you don't need to worry about it, other than the fact of where is it. And if you don't like it in that location, you can move it to a more convenient location. I have moved it all within the Photography folder on my computer so that I can grab this one folder. And I can copy it onto another hard drive, and it copies both the photos and everything to do with the catalog system. And there are some reasons why this isn't the right system for everybody. But this is what works very well for me. Now, inside the Photos folder I have basically two folders. I have a date folder which has all of my photographs organized by date. And then I have a New folder which is basically my inbox. I like having an inbox because it's my to do list of things that I've recently dealt with. I was just dealing with that yesterday. Where is it? It's right there. And then usually once it's kind of settled in, it goes into a chronological system which is very easy to find. And so, within the Date folder I have years. And I actually have decades as well. Cause remember somewhere between 10 and is a nice number of items to have in a group. And so I'll have a decade. Like I have the 2000's which is everything from 2000-2009. Ten folders in there. Very easy to work with. On any particular year, how many folders are you gonna have? 12 that fits between the 10 and the 100 number again. Inside of a particular folder, if I had a really prolific month, I would shoot on how many days? 31 days. A nice number that fits between 10 and 100. So, then I have a folder for each day that I shoot within that month. Looking at the backed off view of everything, on one side I have all the catalog information. On the other side, I have the actual photos, everything in the date system. But I have this inbox, and the reason I have an inbox is so that everything always gets thrown to the inbox. If I throw something into the 2016 folder, it's not always going to be 2016. Or whatever today's date is. And so, that's why I'm able to direct things to one location, and whenever anything comes into my computer, it always goes it the new image. So, I always know where to find it and look for it. Sometimes we get really big days. I love big days in photography. There are days when you're shooting a lot of photos, possibly for a variety of reasons. Three different scenarios that you might run across. One, you just have a really big day, and you shoot a ton of photos, kind of all of the same stuff. I would probably separate my pictures into groups of 1,000. Just don't like to have folders more than 1,000 photos. Things can get very slow on computers when you have too many files in one folder. If you were shooting with different cameras, for instance. Say you have a time-lapse camera and a regular shooting camera. You could probably put all the photos for one camera in one folder, and all the photos from another camera in another photo. Another option is maybe you have different shoots. Maybe you're a portrait photographer and you have three shoots in the same day. Those should probably go in three different folders. That would make perfectly logical sense. And so, breaking those big days up so that they're not too many photos in one folder. Now the folder names that you can use will help you organize these. And so the system that I think makes a lot of sense is naming them with a year, month, day. Not day, month, year because your computer is going to organize everything by number. And this way you can have it listed by year, and it's gonna be chronological. It will be very easy to follow through. Now some people like to have a little bit more information. And so you might wanna add a category or a sub category. Now, computers of today are generally not too picky. You can probably put a space in. You can probably put a dash in. But there are some older systems that don't like dashes. But underscores are pretty well accepted on everything. And so that's kind of a nice, safe default that it's not gonna have a problem. Cause in some cases it won't even allow you to put in a dash. And so the underscore is a very safe, non-character space that you can put in. The file naming of the files themselves. That was the folders we were just talking about. When you take an image with your camera, it's gonna give it probably a couple letter code, and then a numerical system. And then your camera is just gonna cycle through one, two, three, it goes up to 10, and then it goes back down to one. And so it repeats itself every 10,000 photographs that you shoot. This is a terrible name to have in the long run because you're probably gonna shoot more than 10,000 photos, and you don't wanna have photos that have duplicate file names. And so, you need a system that will give you a new file name. You can set up Lightroom and other programs, to rename your photos upon entering Lightroom. And so, I have mine set up to rename the photo by the year, the month, the day, and then a sequential number that just changes automatically. And that way no two photos that I ever take will ever have the exact same number. Now, this works for me. I don't care that the year is part of the photo. I know that there are some stock photographers that don't wanna let their clients know when the photo was taken cause it might seem like an old photograph. And so you might have to come up with a different system. But for most people, doing their own personal photography this is a system that works well. It works very well for me. I can think chronologically. I can think back to a particular year, and think about events in that year. But it's also a very simple system for organizing all your photographs. And so it's a system that works quite well, for individual photographs and it's automatically done. I don't even need to think about it. If you're gonna do that, don't forget in your camera the date and time needs to be set properly. Cause what happens is when it is looking at what name to give that picture, it's looking at the date that it was taken. And so you do have to be aware if you're traveling to Australia for instance, date/time, you cross the date/time line you're gonna wanna adjust that and keep that relatively accurate. One of the complaints that I have about pretty much all modern cameras is the date and time, specifically the time, seems to drift quite a bit more than a typical digital watch. And so, it seems to drift quite a bit. When you go in and out of daylight savings time, that's a good time to kind of reset it and get it back on track again. All right, so as far as Lightroom goes there's gonna be an Import window. And there's gonna be a file naming option, and it is kind of buried in this template under custom settings. And you can go in and you can create a file naming system. So, if you wanna rename your photos, this is how you do it in Lightroom. And so in here, there's gonna be a bunch of different boxes. This is not a full Lightroom section but there's gonna be some boxes in here. You can go select what you want. And so the system that I have set up, is where it sets the year, an underscore, the date, month month, the date dd, underscore, and the a sequential number. And so, the example, as you can see right up above it is gonna give me a year, month, a day, and then a sequential number. If you have Lightroom, look at setting that up. And the beauty is, is once you set it up the first time it automatically does that every time you import. So, it's something you'll only need to get right once. Which is very, very convenient. You can set it up once and you are done with it.