Datasheet

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■ BASIC DIGITAL CAPTURE WORKFLOW
organization I have on my hard drives. To accomplish this, you need to begin with
some organizational structure. This is how I set up my hard drives (Figure 1.5).
Figure 1.5 Dual external hard drives set up as Archive and Archive_Backup
I keep all my images on an external hard drive—this is my image archive that I
duplicate onto a second hard drive. This backup drive gets updated every day or when-
ever I have made any changes to my images or my image catalog. Once a week this
duplicate is moved off site and a third hard drive is brought in and updated to the cur-
rent state of the image archive—this now becomes my new backup and is maintained
every day in the same fashion. After a week of activity, the third drive goes off site and
the second drive is brought back and updated. The two backup drives are continuously
cycling on- and off-site so I always have a disaster insurance copy in the event of a
fire, flood, meteor strike, or other such event that would render both my archive and
backup unuseable.
The root level of the archive contains two folders—one for the images and
one for the Lightroom catalogs. Images and catalogs are organized by year—I make
a new catalog every year to correspond to the image folder for that year. Inside the
year catalog folder is the Lightroom catalog file, previews file, settings folder and the
identity plate file that I use to “label” the open catalog with the date so I know at a
glance which catalog I’m working with. Inside the year image folder are the individual
jobs folders, all labeled with the date (year, month, day) and a descriptive name. Inside
the job folder is a “RAW” folder that contains the RAW captures, as well as a “WIP”
folder that contains work-in-progress PSD files. When images are finished for delivery
or printing, I make a “Finals” folder for them. Inside the “RAW” folder, the images
files are named with my name, followed by the date, followed by the camera’s unique
file identifier number.
I download images from shooting sessions directly into this structure. Once
that is done and the images are renamed, I am finally ready to import the files into
Lightroom. This way the folder structure of the image archive is exactly reflected
inside Lightroom so I can always find images from specific shooting dates without
having to search, filter, or otherwise perform any catalog gymnastics. The folder
structure is clearly visible in the “Folders” pane of Lightroom’s “Library” module
(Figure 1.6).
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