My Workflow for Reviewing Images After a Trip

Collections on LR Mobile Our most recent trip was the first extended one where I had the WD My Passport Wi-Fi drive with me. However, even with it along this time, I still planned to follow my normal practice of replacing a filled memory card with a newly formatted one and store the filled card for off-loading when I get home. During this trip, though, I didn’t even fill up the 16GB SD card in my E-M1 nor the 8GB card in my Olympus Tough TG-3 camera. Since I was using three cameras throughout the week-long trip in Paris, France (yes, I'm counting my iPhone 6 as a camera, especially since I took almost a third of all images captured with it!), it was, however, nice to be able to transfer all images to one location. I did not take my laptop with me this trip, but I could access the My Passport drive at any time I was in our rented apartment with my iPad mini or iPhone and see what pictures I had gotten on a given day. Likewise, anyone else with me could do the same.

LR Mobile Display

Once home with my laptop, I imported all of the images (RAW+JPG) from the card in my E-M1 onto my image storage drive and into Lightroom. I renamed the files using the naming convention "cameraname+paris2015-#,” so these files follow that format, i.e., "em1_paris2015-1,” etc. then I imported all of the images I took with my compact camera, the Olympus Tough TG-3, from the WD My Passport drive using same naming format, as well as those I took with my iPhone. I created a Collection Set for "Paris 2015" and sub-collections for each camera type, so I can see those just taken with the E-M1 or all images together. The total group numbers somewhere around 756 captured images.

Star Ratings

My next step is to go through the images and reject ("x") those that are out of focus or otherwise unusable. I assign a "1" to those I want to look at again for possible use and to edit if necessary. After I finish that exercise I view the images where they "live" on my hard drive and delete from disk all of the rejected ones. Next I view just those images with a star rating of "1” and create a "Paris Picks" Collection. Then I sync that collection with Lightroom Mobile so I can browse and review the images I've selected at my leisure on my iPad mini. Now my total selected group numbers only 424 images. I have no problem editing my images on my iPad, especially now on the mini with retina display. I don't do much editing in any event, usually only some cropping and exposure adjustments. These images are headed for publishing in a Blurb photo book, not for printing and framing. And we will only make two copies of the book, one for us and one for our granddaughter. A nice feature of Lightroom Mobile is that all of my edits on the iPad will sync back up to the originals - even the RAWs from my E-M1 - on my laptop.

Cropping an image - LR Mobile

My initial intention now that I can view my images on my iPad is to go through the selected images one more time and elevate those I decide I really want to use to a two star rating. However, what usually happens at this point is that I think I want them all. So, I generally will make small adjustments in the images - mostly minor crops or brightening, adjusting exposure - and change rating to two stars. Sometimes I come across an image I really like that goes beyond documenting a trip and I bump it to three stars or more. This higher rating lets me later pull just those images with three stars or more into their own Collection for further review. Otherwise, all images with two or more stars are ones I may use to put together my travel photo book.

Please leave me questions or comments on my Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/billbooz) or on Google+ (http://plus.google.com/+BillBooz). I look forward to interacting with you!

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