Essential photography (non-image editing) software

December 13th, 2007

If I just said “Photography software”, I think most would assume I was taking about Photoshop, Lightroom, GIMP, LightZone, etc., so just to be clear, this is not about anything like that.

There are some other very important tools in the modern photographer’s software tool box. What do I use? Glad you asked…

Workflow

After a shoot, I do a a few things right away. I make a zip file of the raw files, and that gets burned to a DVD. I then use the Adobe DNG converter to make second copy of the raw file, in the DNG format. Since Photoshop works better with the DNG files anyway, I just work with them from this point on. The DNG files will get saved along with the edits to another DVD. Since I’ve now got the original image files in two formats in two places, it hopefully give me a bit of future-proofing.

To make finding stuff easier, I stick to a pretty rigid naming convention for files: The four digit number has wrapped around a few times for me, so I rename all files to include the date, and then variations on the file would have different suffixes attached. So “DSCF5036.raw” becomes “2006-09-05_5036.dng”. Lupus Rename is a great free utility for renaming batches of files easily.

Image archive/management

I haven’t counted lately, but my image collection (raw files, Photoshop edits, web images) is backed up on a few hundred DVDs.

I’ve gone through a couple different disc archive managers. This is something that keeps an index of all the files on all the discs so I can easily search the index to figure out which DVD I need to pop in to get the file I want. I’m recently switched to using Where Is It? after various freeware options got too painful. So far, it’s working very well.

I also use IMatch as my image database. This doesn’t get used too often (I just use Bridge to manage the stuff I’m currently working on), but having a single browse-able database of all my the image was invaluable when it came to finding candidate images for the most recent book.

So after I “finish” (as much as one can be finished at any given time) working on a shoot, I’ll burn the files to disc, and then index it with Where Is It? and IMatch.

Website gallery

This blog uses WordPress, and the (experimental) gallery uses my own code, based off of zenphoto.

Since the new year is approaching, though, it’s probably time for yet another another gallery change. I do like the experimental gallery, but it probably doesn’t serve the average visitor nearly as well as a traditional gallery. Time permitting, I’ll be working on something new over the holidays.

I’ve used LightBox on the Lacunal site, and I’m thinking that a simple-looking, AJAX-powered gallery/slideshow is what I want. I need to look into it a bit more, but this may do the trick.

Posted in: Photography