Dec
26
2010

A New Camera Means A New Workflow

Making Picture Project Work For Me (Part 3 or 3)

Sunday, December 26, 2010 - 02:08:45 pm
(Posted Under: Photography, PictureProject)
And now for more on PictureProject. There had to be a better way, and there kinda is. Amazingly while still using PictureProject.

When it comes to handling digital photos, I've had the same system for years, all centered around PictureProject.

  1. Shoot
  2. Move the original photos directly off the SD card
  3. Make a copy of the original photo for Picture Project
  4. Cull & then import into Picture Project
  5. Edit
  6. Export lower resolution for web
It's a work flow that has worked well for me ever since I brought my first digital camera at the end of 2005.

Step 3 came from initially not understanding how PictureProject worked, and generally being cautious. As mentioned in an earlier post, one of the things that is great about PictureProject is that it maintains the original photo, virtually 'appending' any edits to the image in a separate image within the JPEG file. Which, y'know, is pretty cool. Since I didn't initially realize this, plus wanted to be able to easily access the original image for archiving, I always kept a copy of the original file before editing.

Which all meant that I had 3 copies if all photos. Which, y'know, was fine when working at 6MP.

Introduce a 12MP DSLR, and all that begins to change. At ~4MB a pop, a size which is doubled with each edit point (or 'marker' if you read the preceding posts), keeping a separate copy of the original image becomes a bit more unfeasible. And kinda ridiculous when shooting in RAW+JPEG. The untouched original has to go.

Which is doable, given that it's been rare (if at all) that I've needed access to a whole bunch of original photos. With the original always preserved by PictureProject, the only advantage to manually keeping the originals is that it's a pain in PictureProject to revert to the originals. Which has to do with the clunky way PictureProject stores edit points and risk to losing the edit points. But whatev, given the infrequency that I have needed all photos in a set to reverted to originals, I'm no longer worrying about this. And I guess there is probably a safe and easy solution to revert a set of files back to their originals[1].

A further need for a change in work flow is what has been the bane of my existence with the Nikon D5000 until now - no USB mass storage support. That's right, the camera only supports PTP over USB. Which normally wouldn't be a problem, I hardly ever connected my old camera via USB. However, given that I'm using a SDHC card with the new camera and my laptop doesn't support SDHC, there's a bit of a problem. Sure, I could use my Netbook, but that's kind of a pain. So I'll use USB please.

Windows handling of PTP is absolutely horrible. Not only does it screw with the filenames, but it doesn't allow deleting/moving photos. Not to mention it seems to show NEF's as JPEG's. Eh

However, I just found the solution - Nikon Transfer. Something I vaguely looked at (bundled with PictureProject) in 2005, before deciding to not use it. However, for a camera without USB mass storage support, it's a life saver.

One of my pet peeves with PictureProject has been that it insists on copying photos to a specific location on import. That would have been good, but I have never wanted my photos stored in folders named 001 etc. And I don't want them under \My Documents\My Pictures\PictureProject, thank you very much. Hence, I've always copied the originals myself, using a folder name I want, and imported with 'copy original files off'. What I have discovered with Nikon Transfer is that I can at least set the base folder transfers are copied to. So, hey, Nikon Transfer can transfer the photos to C:photos as I like. Sweet. I don't have the control over the folder name that I'd like, but at least it's not 001, nor under My Documents.

Being forced to use this, I've discovered one thing in PictureProject that I never knew. I can rename a (file system) folder, then have PictureProject 'find' the missing file/photo. Or, have me find the missing file actually. That I was kinda aware of in someway. But I didn't realize that it would then try and find any other missing file in that collection within that new folder. All this means that I can rename the folder, and 'find' the new location - rather than what I first did, which was rename, delete the new collection, and import the photos from the new folder into a new collection.

And hence comes a new work flow.

  1. Shoot
  2. Transfer photos from camera using Nikon Transfer
  3. Rename transferred folder as desired
  4. 'Find' the missing files within the transferred collection in Picture Project
  5. Rename collection as desired
  6. Edit
  7. Export lower resolution for web
Arguable this work flow is actually a lot easier, particularly since I don't need to switch out of Picture Project at all. Gone are the days of having to have 2 Windows Explorer windows open, and then having to open Picture Project.

There is an extra step in there, with all that renaming folders, finding the files and renaming the collection (as opposed to if Nikon Transfer asked me what folder I wanted to put the files in), but it's still oldly quicker and requires less thought than what I used to do.

An added advantage to all of this is that collections created due to transfers are stored under a "Transfers" collection/folder in Picture Project. Previously after doing an import, there was no way for me to easily tell if I'd edited and exported a batch of photos. Inherently with this work flow, provided I move collections into the root collection once I've done everything (edited, exported, put into Photobox), I can infer that anything still under "Transfers" has not been processed. That's going to be a time saver in itself.

Sadly, just like "Import", "Transfer" cannot be set to transfer to a network drive. So the last post about hacking the database still applies with this work flow.

There are a lot of ways that PictureProject works that is of annoyance to me, given the way I like to do things, but surprisingly, having to change to this new work flow has most of them.

[1] By copying the edited files to a new location, importing them into Picture Project and restoring these to originals. Provided that PictureProject allows "Revert to original" as a batch operation. Which, thankfully it does.


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