Original subtitles

Hey everyone, how's it going?

I know some people are better at learning

through video, some people are better at learning

through text article.

So I wanted to create a video to

augment the much longer and more in-depth

article that I wrote.

This video is gonna sort of summarize everything

that I went into detail on.

You know, at the end of the day,

this type of topic is pretty tricky because

like I mentioned in the article, all of

us have a different risk tolerance versus convenience

tolerance.

All of us have a different way of

organizing things that make sense for our brain.

You might tag something as a color to

represent something.

I might use the flag or I might

use the star rating in a reverse order

from the way that makes sense for you.

And all of that I'm very aware of,

but at the end of the day, whatever

system that works for you shouldn't have many

manual aspects to your process, especially when it

has to do with importing your raw files

and backing those things up.

That should be a very automated task that

just doesn't require you to do anything manually

because human error is where you start to

invite potential issues where you get confused or

you forget or whatever.

Anytime you have a human aspect to your

workflow, you're inviting unwanted issues.

So just to summarize, I shoot to the

Sony M-series Tough Cards, 256 gigabytes.

This is in my camera the entire time.

I try and minimize ejecting memory cards from

my camera even so far as to connect

a USB-C cable to my camera body,

my EOS R to copy the images to

my computer and ultimately my hard drives.

I never, if I can avoid it, eject

the cards from my camera body.

However, if I am traveling and I want

an offsite real time or close to real

time duplicate of all my files, I will

use something like the GNARBOX to pop my

memory card in and make a backup of

all the raw files to this guy.

The GNARBOX has a ton of features that

might work really well for some people, but

I was just running into a lot of

issues with the wireless hotspotting, the automatic Dropbox

backup and all sorts of other things that

this did.

I was running into issues mostly with the

battery life.

It would just die in the middle of

a transfer and I wouldn't know where I

had hit in that transfer.

It doesn't have an auto-confirm, even recovering

from a dead battery to let you know

where it was in the process.

So at the end of the day, I

found even something as advanced and as expensive

as the GNARBOX to be best suited for

just a dumb standalone backup situation.

I pop my memory cards in there, I

hit backup, I eject my memory card, put

it back in my camera and I never

touch this again, unless I have to purge

something that's many months old.

That's how I found this best to operate.

Yes, you can import to this from your

SD card and then mount this to your

computer as an external hard drive.

But again, this thing would die sometimes and

some ports it would charge while being mounted

and in other ports, it wouldn't charge while

being mounted and it just became a little

too murky for my comfort level.

Again, going back to our convenience versus risk

tolerances, for me, I just keep this as

a dumb box.

I do not connect it as an external

hard drive to my computer at any point.

So I import to this when I'm offsite.

I will then, when I get home, take

that same memory card and either connecting it

through the USB-C port of my camera

body or if you have to eject it

and use it through an SD card reader,

I recommend this one.

It's a pro-grade dual SD card reader.

There are very few, surprisingly, dual card readers

but I like to import from both cards

at the same time, not each card individually.

And I do my entire import process in

Lightroom.

I don't do anything manually using Finder or

any other like photo mechanic or anything kind

of like that.

So I'm gonna jump over to my desktop

here.

I just plugged in these two SD cards

that are connected over a USB-C cable

to my desktop.

And let's take a look.

I've got my 2020 Lightroom catalog.

Before I go through the import process, let

me just show you how I've got my

Lightroom catalog set up.

My catalog itself sits on my local hard

drive.

My raw files sit on my external drives

always but my catalog file itself, I use

one per year.

So this is Lightroom 2020.

That sits on my local iMac Pro hard

drive and wherever your catalog sits, you'll have

a bunch of these sidecar files that have

to be there.

Don't try and play around with moving those.

And that works really well.

So just as a frame of reference, catalog

sitting on my local hard drive.

My raw files are ultimately gonna go to

one of these two places, the Promise RAID.

Let's see if we can zoom in.

Promise RAID 2 and Promise Backup area.

Okay, so I've got my two SD cards.

I have these full of pictures of just

my desk here.

So not a real shoot.

I just wanted to simplify the number of

pictures we were working with and yeah, show

you a simplified version of this workflow.

So when you have SD cards or cameras

or anything connected that you're importing from, I

always go down here and select the main

root folder.

I break this out.

I never use the little devices shortcut that

Lightroom presents you with.

I always select down here, the main root

folder of each memory card.

Boom.

Okay, so these are, I've got 13 images

to import.

So not that big a deal, but the

process is the same whether it's 13 or

13,000.

Build previews.

I always set to standard.

Build smart previews always.

Yes, keep that check marked.

Don't import suspected duplicates.

Make a second copy.

So this is where I'm telling Lightroom, make

a complete separate distinct copy of my raw

files.

And this is another, my secondary external hard

drive connected to my computer over Thunderbolt.

And it just saves it in a simple

dated folder there on the date that you

imported.

So hopefully I never, ever touch these raw

files again.

You can leave add to collection unchecked.

Now I do rename my files, a custom

little template that I built.

You can do whatever makes sense for you,

but I find it very helpful to have

year, month, day, hour, minute, second be the

file name itself because that way every file

has its own unique name.

If you leave stuff, the default name that

the camera assigns, oftentimes you'll bump into an

issue where anything over 9,999 clicks on

your camera rotates back to 0001.

So across a full year or more, you're

gonna have multiple files eventually.

Once you shoot more than 9,999 images,

you're gonna have files with the same name,

which is no good, bad, bad idea.

So I just use that.

That always seems to work well for me.

Apply during import.

I do import with a preset that we're

not gonna talk about today, but I like

to see my images never straight out of

camera, right?

I don't wanna see the raw edit.

I wanna see, even if my preset doesn't

look right, I always have my import preset

applied.

And any preset you have saved to your

computer, you can select as that import preset.

I highly recommend you do that.

That way when everything's rendered, you're smart and

your standard previews, you have that preset ready

to go.

There's no load time.

Keywords.

This is where I categorize by client name,

location, any distinguishing keyword that's gonna help be

something that you remember later on that is

easy to search for.

And then destination.

So this is the main working location of

where your images are gonna be.

On my destination drive, which is my Promise

Raid 2 hard drive, I'll show you what

that organizational structure looks like in Finder, and

then we'll talk through it in Lightroom.

So if I open this up, where I

have my raw files saved are two different

locations, one called In Progress and one called

Delivered.

So In Progress is where I initially import

everything to.

Right here, you can see this breakdown, Promise

Raid 2, In Progress, and Lightroom auto-sets

by date a dated folder for me.

So this is today's date, May 4th, imported

year 2020.

I'm gonna hit Import.

Now, what that does on the left side

when you're in library mode is it adds

a new folder and those images right here

for me under In Progress 2020.

Once I'm done delivering and editing these images,

I'll click and physically drag this to Delivered,

and it will change that location in Finder

as well.

It'll automatically move it out of Finder and

pop it into my Delivered 2020 folder automatically.

The reason I do this, well, one, it

just makes sense for my brain.

Two, I have Backblaze.com set up as

my cloud backup, and I have this monitoring

in Preferences monitoring my In Progress folder only.

So yeah, I have Backblaze monitoring this In

Progress folder.

Once I have everything rendered and imported into

Lightroom, then I sit down and start the

manual culling process of flagging my keepers, whatever

those are gonna be, and then edit those.

So I'm gonna just edit one for fun,

this guy, even though it's not a great

picture.

So of course, I will sort by flagged

first.

I will edit all the flagged images, and

once I'm ready for delivery, I will use

a plugin.

Instead of exporting as a folder of JPEGs

on my desktop or something like that, I

actually use a plugin from my gallery host

called PicTime.

This plugin hooks in with my username and

my account with PicTime and lets me manage

and create all of my galleries directly from

Lightroom.

So this is so much nicer than having

to log in over browser or use some

sort of app.

I can just do this from Lightroom, create

a new project.

I'll do this workflow demo, scene name, I'll

just call it demo, doesn't really matter.

Hit create.

And now I can click and drag any

images I wanna deliver in this gallery to

that new scene.

So we've got four here.

I can even set the cover photo from

within Lightroom, which is really nice, I'll do

that.

And you can do a subcategory of highlights

as well if you want, but that's optional.

Then you click on the main gallery and

you have this new button over here called

publish, just below the library module.

Hit publish, and it will automatically convert the

raw files to JPEG.

You can adjust the settings for whatever you

prefer to do that.

I have mine set to JPEG quality 85

and resolution 300, sharpen for screen standard.

That's about all I do in terms of

my export these days.

It's pretty simplified.

And at any point, I can click on

this crazy long link up here and it'll

take me to the gallery in PicTime where

I can start entering client email addresses and

all that kind of stuff.

But you can see they're already starting to

render the images in PicTime.

And then I ultimately send the delivery email

through PicTime itself for the final gallery.

So here is my workflow demo gallery of

images, boom, sitting right here forever as high

res JPEGs on PicTime.

That is the extremely brief nutshell of how

all of this works.

I would go through step by step and

make sure for speed and actual like optimization

of Lightroom operating quickly, you do my best

recommended steps in terms of your catalog settings

being set to standard preview size, whatever is

the largest option, whenever you click it, it

should be 2880.

Preview quality set to high.

And that's the only important aspect of catalog

settings.

Over here, when you go to preferences, performance,

if you have a graphics processor, these days

you can use it.

Adobe's first pass implementation of using a GPU

was really poorly done.

So I didn't use to recommend it, but

now it's fine, but it's still not gonna

be a huge night and day difference in

performance.

I haven't found, but this is what's really

key.

Use smart previews instead of originals for image

editing.

Make sure that's checkmarked.

And I turn off enable hover preview of

presets and loop.

I turn that off because that seems to

just slow things down.

And I also turn off generate previews in

parallel.

That seems to be a little bit too

much of an ask for Lightroom.

The other two big things you can do

is always keep your histogram minimized.

This like literally doubles the speed of Lightroom.

Just keep that thing minimized.

It's crazy.

Additionally, I would go to your applications folder,

find Lightroom, wherever it is.

Here it is, Lightroom classic.

Click on that icon, go to file, get

info, and make sure open in low resolution

is checkmarked.

Now what this does, you'll have to reboot

Lightroom once you have that checkmarked.

What this does is actually create a low

resolution GUI interface for Lightroom.

So every time you open it, you'll notice

the text and the whole interface is slightly

pixelated, like blocky.

And that's just because it's pushing a quarter

of the pixels that a retina display tends

to call for.

So you'll see a massive performance boost in

terms of speed.

With all of these things done, again, go

through the article that I wrote step-by

-step, but with all of these things done,

you should see Lightroom react exactly this fast.

Super, super, like beyond faster than you would

ever need, particularly in library mode.

And then almost just as fast in develop

mode.

Again, I would keep the histogram minimized even

in develop mode, but you should see never

that the little like annoying loading icon that

occurs down here in the bottom area, you

should never see that.

If you are seeing that, then you need

to re-render your previews or just start

from the beginning from what I've recommended.

As a side note, if you've already imported

images and you wanna try and optimize and

speed things up, you can do that.

You can go to any image that you've

got imported into Lightroom already, select that image

or all the images, make sure you're in

library mode, go up to library, go down

to previews, and then select build standard previews.

You'll see a little build start to occur

there and then do the exact same thing.

Go to library, previews, build smart previews.

And this will one at a time, render

all the low res previews that you need

for super fast Lightroom editing.

The end of the day, that's about it.

Once I've finished delivering, say for example, these

are the only images I wanna deliver from

this workflow gallery.

I literally manually, let me move my preview.

I manually click and drag that dated folder

to my delivered folder.

And again, that moves it in my operating

system, that moves it in my hard drives,

wherever I put it.

Let's see here.

I am now in delivered 2020 and here

it is.

Those raw files have moved in Finder, exactly

where I wanna keep them.

Backblaze will stop monitoring those files in the

in progress folder and eventually purge them from

the cloud backup, which is totally fine.

That's how I have my workflow set up.

That works best for me.

It has not failed me in a decade.

And I would love to hear anybody's, you

know, own personal preference for that kind of

thing.

I think this system works the easiest, whether

you're a super beginner starting out or if

you're ultra advanced.

And yeah, I can't recommend it enough.

So thank you for your attention.

I hope you found this helpful and I

hope you're staying well.

Bye.