Welcome back to prophotoinsights. Today, we’re in my office and we’re gonna do a little video about workflow and archiving your work. This is probably one of the most important videos you can probably watch at this series because it’s okay going out and taking fantastic pictures and coming back and retouching them and creating these wonderful masterpieces. But if you have any kind of problem at home with your computer system and all your images are on the computer system, then you’re gonna lose a whole lot and also that will be quite devastating. So I’m gonna look at ways that you can easily archive images on to several storage mediums and try to ensure that the, your, your basically safeguarding your collection of work. Also, as probably as important is a way of actually filing your images shot, so, let’s say you’ve, you’ve accumulated, you know a 6 gig, say, let’s just 6, like somewhat collection of images. Even that 6 gig, to try and get back to it and find a one particular imaging shot is gonna be a nightmare unless you’ve obviously keyworded and maybe renamed your files. So I’m gonna show you the work folder I used, I’m not saying it’s the, the way to do it, it’s the way it works for me. And just give you, perhaps give you a few ideas of how you can implement something yourself. So like I said, we’ll start, we’ll show you my folder systems and then we’ll be downloading our images of our flash card and I’ll show you how we can convert those into a formats. Okay, so before I show you how I download the image and so forth, I just wanna show you my folders that I used. On here, you’ll see a folder called image folders, this is basically a blank folder which I used and you’ll see this. This is actually job folders with the message in. I’ve basically renamed this one with a description, date description. For instance, this is the one we’ll gonna be working on, this one says 2009-January-05, the 5th of January 2009. Then I’ve got a job number. This one is j0000-pers. Which basically tells me, this not particularly job number for this one is personal work, which is p-e-r-s abbreviated for, this one here tells me it’s 2009, January 2nd, again no job number but the abbreviation in the end, p-r-p-i stands for prophotoinsights. And that’s how I tend to set those up so basically date led with a small description at the end which, didn’t mean a lot to you but means a bit to me, and that means I can, you know, bit I’m looking for. Some images that I shot in 2005 I can narrow it down by the date there, and if I do know I shot it in, say November, again I can narrow it down a bit further. But I can also use a digital, digital asset management system, also to where, to use to find by keyword different images as well. We shall you a bit later. So yes, the blank folder I’ve used is basically I just got these folders inside. So I’ll show you this one we shall working on, so I click it, and inside is another folder which got another description, and this one is called Elton sky. And again, it’s just another way of searching, so I can look inside that folder now that I’ve got some images of skies shot in Elton, which again, I, means something to me, might mean something to you, but again, it could be anything. You could put in, I don’t know, fireworks, you know, polar war or what have you and it probably, you know, be more descriptive to you than with anybody else. But again it will helps trying to find stuff. We click inside again, and I’ve got several other folders, one’s called Camera Raw, which all my Camera Raw images go into. I’ve got folder for the finished images, so I’ve done. Done a bit post reduction on and tussled jpeg, I put them in the Finished folder. I don’t need to worry about this one. I set that in there for now. Then I got the Masters, now the Masters are the photoshoped PST layered files. So, you know, I’ve got quite a good organization, I know what I’m looking in, again, for the images. Just this one, just for instance is called Panos, sort of work I’ve done involve shooting HDR, high dynamic range, spears and domes, and that folder is what I’m doing at is another folder to help me break down the different images into different folders. I’m not gonna show you that, it’s, you don’t need to see it. So you can see already, it’s a useful system for keeping yourself organized. So I’m just gonna come out there now. So what we’re doing next, we’ll just going in and we’ll download the images from the flash card onto the hard drive. Alright, so we plugged our camera flash card into the reader, and after our day shoot and here’s the folder on the desktop so we can double click on that, open that, and that is full of my lovely pictures of being out, working hard to capture. I can then go to my folder I’ve made, which is this one here, and basically just command a, to select all these of the flash card and drag them in to the Camera Raw folder, like so, oops, like so. Okay, so those all have downloaded now, so in here we have the images we have shots. First thing I’ll do now is just to convert them. And I convert my images to Adobe digital negative, DNG. You don’t have to do this step, but it’s something I’ve got a habit of doing. So the first thing, if you do this, basically you just select your folder where your pictures are lying, which is this one here. Camera Raw, and select, and I decided, the settings I used is save the images in the same location and basically, I don’t rename them here, extension is .dng. I have full size jpeg previews and the compression is lost, lost. Preserve the raw image and you can embed the actual camera raw, your native camera raw image in the digital, digital negative version. So you can, but if I, it doubles the file size, and I just don’t see the point of doing that. Be kinder, you can preserve the original within the file as well. I’m, how it will work, but that’s what happens. So then we just hit Convert and basically what it’s doing now, it will now go through each file and it will, it will process it into a .dng file. One of the reasons for this is the guys at Adobe obviously thought that to the some of the cameras on the market on their own kind of native digital, digital, digital raw file format, that there’s also probably a danger some of the, some of the camera manufacturer said go into maybe full butter ways selling the future and we may not be able to open these files. So they decided it would good to have a kind of once and all kind of universal image format and that’s the idea of the DNG, digital negative format. It’s all kind of files can be read by, obviously software in the future. So, it’s a, like I said, not everybody use it, I do, and I think it’s a good way of storing your images and trying, just trying to fuse it for yourself. So, we’ll let those convert then we’ll come back and go on to the next stage. Okay, so our convergence is complete, so we now just close that, close that down in there. We should be able to go back to our folder, like so. And you’ll see we have duplicates of all the images, both the Canon CRT2 format and the DNG format. So what you need to do is just go in and just, I wanna delete the camera raw ones. Now we don’t really keep both of them, so we’ll go in and just delete those quickly. Okay, so what we do now, we’ll, we’ll sort these by kind. And we grab all the Canon native raw images and we can just drag those to the bin, out of the way. And we should just be left with the DNG files. Okay, so, now we sort that out, just make sure, that’s so refresh, so now we’re left with our raw images. Now at this stage what I tend to do, I used to go to a stage where I wouldn’t throw very much out and that’s not because I get every image absolutely perfect, I get 99.99 percent perfect, only joking. But I used to keep a lot of my images that I didn’t need to, it wasn’t ‘til I got to about my 6, my external hard drive storage that I thought this is getting a bit silly, I must try and stop calling out a lot more of my images. So, what I do at this stage now, before doing anything calls, I tend to go through the images and just pick out anything that I don’t really need to keep. And so for so, that’s what we’ll do now, I’ll just go through them quickly and anything I’m not, don’t think works at all, or don’t need, like this one, I’m not sure why I shot that. I’ll just dump into the trash. And the rest of these I keep, now I can go click on command A, or select all and now what I wanna do rename this images. So we go to tools, battery name, and what I’m gonna do is rename this with the same filename as our folder which was 2009, zero, oops, zero, one, dash, I think it was zero, five, then dash no job numbers, that stays at j, and then four zeros, it’s personal so it’s dash p-e-r-s and the sequence number starts at one. So you’ll see down here, it’s gonna be renamed from this number camera raw file straight from the camera, which means nothing to something a bit more descriptive, and this one is gonna be 2009, 01, which is January, dash 05 and then my job number, personal and then on the end of that we got the actual file number, this one is named triple 0,1 and so forth. So this is to be named in order. So I’m gonna preserve current filename within the exit data, does not know why but again that’s what we must do, and there we go, they’re all renamed from one, right down to 18. With our file number and plus the actual number of the actual individual image. So that’s that done, the next thing I do then is to again set them all then I will go to file info and I got a preset in the camera raw here. I got a preset already done called Plant Copyright, and that automatically adds in my copyright information to the images. Click ok. And that will embed that information to all the images. And then we’ll go to tool, window workspace and get my keywording panel up and in here, this is a whole new, whole video in itself. It’s the keywording, I’ve built this up over, oh god, years. And I’ve add in different keywords that I’ve used for different jobs I do and different types of images I produced. For instance I got one here which is called Clients, so I just click on those, add a client name. I got one here for Cars – Makes – Models, we got all like different car like Bentley, BMW and so forth. And all types like diesel and the model numbers, and again just the things that I used on a fairly regular basis, or used in big jobs. And I keep them in folders there so that if I need to find them anytime, for instance if I put down here, I want sky, it will show me, I got sky in there ready and I can just click on that and that’s gonna name all the files that we’re in now, but we don’t want naming this sky, coz they’re not sky. But all the files I want to name sky are now named sky. So that’s a good way of just keywording, I can't stress the importance of keywording your images. Because it’s only when you build up a very large collection of images and your setting them on a CD or hard drives I think, and let’s say you wanna find the picture you shot of your daughter’s birth, you know, 20 odd years ago, that’s gonna use, you know, you shoot a lot of images, you know, you’re gonna be going through thousands and thousands of images. But if you keyword them, then at a click of a button you can narrow it down much, much quicker. So you got to, you got to keyword your images, especially if you are pretty prolific in shooting and you just do, just a must do keep them in good order really. So that’s the next stage, we’ll go through this, I don’t want go to each one, but I will go through each one and I will name them with a descriptive name, and I even go, for the sky image, I leave sort of go into and put it as sunset, or dawn, and if it is winter, if it is a cloudy sky, clear sky, sunny sky, the color. So if I did want to narrow it down, say, into weeks time I wanna find all my images shot, you know, cloudy sky, with red in them, I can literally pinpoint them. It’s all because I give them a keyword and so, very important to get a keyword right. Also in here in the file info box, you can put, obviously copyright which I already done, I’ve got already set that up as I, and saved it and saved it in here as a template. So anytime I, I need to sort of add to the same data to the images, I’ll do a preset like that, save them a template. So in here then you also got a description tab and I’ll use this as well, I’ll put a bit of short description in. Whether if it’s just for me, for my use, and bear in mind, if you send this images to, to stock library or anybody else, you can always have this script out anything that’s they don’t need use, but it’s more for your, I keyword this mainly for myself, first and foremost so I can find them. And if I to sent all these images to a stock library, I would perhaps strip out some of the bits they don’t really want to know about or don’t mean anything to them, so. That’s the, that’s the, so yeah, so build up those keywords put them in a folder, and keep yourself organized. Basically I can, I can go to keywords in this now pretty quickly coz a lot of keywords I used, I already got in here. And you know, if you look down here, I got all sorts of baseball, basketball, bath, you name it, birds, buckets, so, all sorts of rubbish, some of them I’ll probably gonna use again, but it’s in there. So, it builds up a nice collection. And you can buy, buy software these days, help you keyword images like that. But, you know, everybody’s different we all got certain things that we photograph and you’re better off going at it on your own. Coz you know, at least you got them there saved. Right, well I’ve change my mind a little bit and I wanna go back over these images just to make sure it’s absolutely clear. So, we’re in the breach in CS3, and we’re in keywording panel. I’m gonna right click on the summation click file info, and then gonna just add a description, and so can put sunset lane. I can then from the top here, save this. Coz we wanna apply the same description to all these images. Save method data template and then we can call this one Lane Sunset, click on the save button, ok. Now we can select all these file info, and we can actually put in that same description in all these images. If I can find it, Lane Sunset, click ok, and all those will be now named in the descriptions Sunset Lane. Okay, so that’s one way, if you’re applying the same set up description so that all the same images, you can save lot of time by, by saving the method data, as a method data template. You can see quite few in there. Next step after that of course, to add the keyword, and if you haven’t got any already set up, you need just to go to the bottom of the palette here and to add a new keyword, like so, this one we could call Lane, okay. You could, if you wanted to do like I’ve done it, have a little folder for, you can then just right click and add new sub keyword, and you could then, obviously you have some like Lane, could refer to country, country lane, I don’t know, and so forth. You can just keep adding keywords like that, having little folders, nicely tuck away. So let’s say, so we take these four images here, they’re all in the country lanes, so, we can click the country box there and the lane box and that will then assign those keywords into the keyword box, like so. So you can imagine once you’ve built up a lot of these keywords, it’s just a matter of just getting your images and going through them. So, for these four now, now I could put in, and also put in, let’s see, let’s pick out one of this, you wanna, let’s pick out the skies here. So we could pull our search box down here, which is obviously available CS3, I’m not sure if it was available CS2, I can't quite remember. So we could put in a sky, and that would actually pop up with that keyword, if you got it already, already in there. We could also, while in there, click stormy, coz it’s quite stormy sky. And then we might wanna put a color, so let’s search dual search for red, and red’s already in there, so we put that in. So these are all personal keywords that you might search by in the future. But we’re all different, we all may choose different words that we probably use at certain images, also another one, you might, might put in your own sky, you might use the word skies, I have that in here as well. So this is how you need to sort of build your collection enough. And this is a very personal thing because we all use different, different words to describe the same thing. So, it’s quite a personal thing. But that’s how you build it up, and I said it helps out in the future when you archive these in retrieving them, the image you need. Okay, so, we’ve now keyword our images and renamed them, so next thing I do before anything else is I burn a copy of the camera raw images that we’ve keyworded on to the DVD, okay, just a standard DVD. This will then eventually be stored off site at another location, and that’s our, as our first, first safeguard of first archive. Once I’ve done what I need to do with my images and finish with them completely, I will then transfer them onto an external hard drive, this is a terabyte, I got two of them here. I got a lot more of that actually, I got probably about 6 or 7 of them archive away. This is my latest batch, so I got two of them here, so this one, I’ll copy everything on to, and this is stored here in my office or at home anyway. The other copy gets stored off site, again, so therefore what I basically got, I got two copies of my completed images of my raws, of my masters and finished images, I got stored on two different disk at different locations. That’s my first safeguard, I’ve got two copies. My third copy obviously is just the camera raw, so, basically what, what, what we got here is basically three copies of the images. Two copies of the completed camera raws, masters and finished and one copy of the actual camera raw. So, if the worst, absolute worst, come to worst for whatever reason, and I lost both of these drives, heaven forbid, just word, hopefully I’ve got another medium, not hard drive but a DVD, and hopefully, I have therefore three bite of the cherry. Okay, so, you know, if nothing else, if the drive were to fail, I already got the raws on this one, but it’s better than nothing. I did use to put a whole complete copy of finish images on to DVD as well, but it just get ridiculous, that was about 500 DVD, and I was buying them in box of a hundred and spending most of my life burning DVD’s, it was no fun. And storage media now has come down to quite, you know, reasonable price and this is a much better way of working if we need to, we’ve got a complete, complete copy. So that’s how I do it, and obviously people have got other ideas and other ways of doing it, but that’s what works for me. Right, so you keyword your images, you’ve archive them on your various media, so that’s it, or is it? Well obviously, that’s fine, but you still need to find them once they’re archives away on wherever you put them on whether it be DVDs or hard drives. Now digital asset management is something that, there’s got a few different software programs out there, this one is called Extensis Portfolio, this is one I used. And basically, what happen is I can add the images, you can actually catalog the drives, put the drive in and it will actually catalog all the images on the drive. Now this is the one of my drives called PA-0004 and its catalog all the images on that drive. And because I’ve keyworded these images it will also catalog the images with the keywords. So therefore, it’s quite, you could have just scroll through and perhaps, you know, just go by, by visually looking through your stuff. But, you know, just in this one gallery, there’s a hundred and ten, over 110, 000 images. So anyway, so for instance, let’s say I’m looking for a character that often says, you know, images you shot two years ago of the mini, and you really need a copy of them. So what I wanted to do is to go onto the top here, type in my keyword, its’ mini, press enter, and it will take you a few while and then everything that is keyworded with mini will pop up a little catalog, like so. And down here, here we go, here’s some of the shots I did of the mini which maybe is one of the ones the client wants. So there we can scroll further in the DNG and raw files there. And that will be all sorts of stuff as well, TIFs and jpegs, anything that I keyworded for that shot will prop up. So that’s how easy it is then, I’m gonna just right click on here and at original and it will copy, as long the drive plug in, it will copy the, that original straight to your hard drive, out to your desktop. And also you can have, you can have collections and burn to CD, it’s quite a useful, bit of a software. You can make webpages straight from there. So, that’s some of the things in the market now, Eye View media is one of it, which is by Microsoft now, there’s a fair few of things you can use, obviously if you’re using a Mac, there is the Spotlight, and it will actually index your drive and. I have had some, you know, experience of finding images this way, but again just the software approach like this is much more flexible for you. So, there we go, so that’s a little bit of a powerful bit software which you can incorporate and catalog in and obviously that way you got full control all over your archive. I hope that your pictures are on board and start from, start archiving your work and try and safeguard it from any possible, god forbid, disasters. Anyway, thanks for watching prophoto insights, be sure to check out prophotoinsights.net/forum, where we got another video up there and hopefully we’ll catch you on our next video. Cheers.