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Archive 2017 · Photo management for wildlife

NorthMac
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Photo management for wildlife

New member here after some years of scanning these excellent forums. I’m one of the many that has sold off DSLR gear to become a largely m43 photographer, and over the past three years I am becoming more “hooked” on bird photography. While I have the usual gear questions that are well discussed here on FM, and do see upgrading gear at some point, what is changing for me is as much related to photo workflow and management. So my question (and the reason for posting in this sub-forum): Wildflife photography, as I am finding out, results in many different kinds of images, and many more, than when I was largely shooting general landscape. Over time I self-edited landscapes, shot less, and my usual Lightroom management of using keyword tags and GPS locations, and very few actual file folders, works well for finding photos and keeping organized. This is not working as well for birds.

First of all, I shoot many “ID” shots which I know are not keepers but are useful for ID once back home. For birds close enough to aim at image quality, and even without using many continious burst style shots, I just end up with many different angles / tries at focus / tries using different ISO and shutter speed / etc. for even the same bird on the same perch, that I would say my images may multiply by at least 5, sometimes by 10, compared to when I was not shooting wildlife.

So for those who may have gone through the same migration of interests, I would be interested in hearing what, if anything, you needed to do to maintain sufficient organization and searchability of your images (assume in LR but may not be…). Some sub-questions include:

- for those maintaining bird lists, are they in any way integrated into your photo management?
- keyword each bird species by its name? Or a more general keywording?
- likely we delete many more images than other photography styles do, but is there anything more sophisticated than just doing a ranking and keeping only the +3 shots, for example? I guess this gets to the definition of a “keeper”.

I know this is not as juicy as discussing the latest Nikon body or Canon lens, but I’m guessing many here have put as much serious thought into the photo management side as they have their gear. And a thank you for all the very talented members here who contribute their images and knowledge so freely.

Cheers, Colin

Jun 15, 2017 at 06:08 PM

arbitrage
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Photo management for wildlife

For me I'm now keywording bird species and occasional locations but usually just the species.
I use LR and organize by dated folders. I sometimes get more organized and create LR collections and group the birds into different categories like "waterfowl" and upload that to my Smugmug but I'm usually months and months behind on that part. But as long as I have the keywords done after culling the images I can always find things later on.
For me I import to LR, generate 1:1 previews and then in the Library module go through the images at 1:1 and all I do is use the X key to reject and the right arrow to advance if it is a keeper. Turning on Auto Advance speeds this up as once you hit X it goes to the next image. I don't bother with ranking any of the shots like 3, 4, 5 stars...too much effort. Sometimes as I'm culling if I see a really good one I know I want to edit and share then I hit "P" to flag it as a pick and thats it.
I have days with 4000 shots and usual culling for me goes down to around 600-800 from that. I really need to be even more critical but hard drives are relatively cheap so I'm okay with the number of GBs I generate a year (usually just under 1TB).

Birds do rack up the shots a lot and even more so if you use a high FPS camera....with my 1DX2 it is very hard to even take a single shot while in 14FPS continuous so even if I want to I usually end up with 2 shots.

Jun 15, 2017 at 06:41 PM

Bobg657
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Photo management for wildlife

What I do is use Photomechanic to select my keepers, import those to LR, chose 3-5 stars I go through them, and then keyword the bird name in the Library module.

The first step means the non-3-5 star shots never hit my hard drive and are deleted from the sd card in camera. Overall about 10% make it to LR.

Jun 15, 2017 at 06:54 PM

morris
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Photo management for wildlife

I have a folder for every shoot location and subfolders by date of shoot. I keep my processed images in the dated folder and have a subfolder in each dated folder called "Orig" where I keep the RAW or unedited JPEGs. Before I process I use Photoshop ACR to rate images and get rid of errors.

Morris

Jun 15, 2017 at 07:29 PM

bobbytan
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Photo management for wildlife

I am doing the same thing i.e. I name my folders by location, and have sub-folders by date of shoot. I don't go by species because (a) I am not familiar with a lot of the birds/species so it will be too hard for me to ID them, and (b) I don't shoot a lot of wildlife/birds, so filing my images by location works best for me.

morris wrote:
I have a folder for every shoot location and subfolders by date of shoot. I keep my processed images in the dated folder and have a subfolder in each dated folder called "Orig" where I keep the RAW or unedited JPEGs. Before I process I use Photoshop ACR to rate images and get rid of errors.

Morris

Jun 15, 2017 at 08:56 PM

NorthMac
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Photo management for wildlife

Interesting set of responses - thanks to all.

Geoff - I seem closer to your system than the others; need to work at getting down to 20% as keepers, and God knows what I will do once I have a high FPS system that focuses more accurately... ! But good problems as they say...

Bob- not familiar with PhotoMechanic but will check it out. At first glance though, if you use it on your SD card directly as suggested, this seems to go against the usual recommendations to minimize writes/ deletes to your card before files are backed up?

Morris and Bobby - the folder approach is where most people started; the pure LR approach would be to "trust the metadata" rather than carefully document by folder, but I fully understand the logic in doing so.

On this location aspect, I use fairly general location keywords (province, general locality name or Park etc), but then I have been using GPS location using the LR Map module, since it was introduced in LR5. Without getting hyper-exact it takes fairly little time to drag groups of images onto the Map, thus saving the location and allowing you to browse photos based on the Map view. However I am more map-focused than most (geology background). A camera with built-in GPS would thus save this step.

I take it then that to the extent people are keeping bird sighting lists, they keep these separate from their bird photos? (ie. as long as the bird image is keyworded it can be searched for).

Jun 15, 2017 at 09:31 PM

bgorum
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Photo management for wildlife

I've been using the same method I started using years ago, based on whats suggested in the DAM Book. When I come home from shooting all my pictures get placed into a folder called "working files" until I get a chance to edit and keyword them. "Working files" lives on my computer's hard drive and gets backed up along with everything else by my regular Time Machine backups. No picture gets to leave the "working files" folder until it has been keyworded. For keywords I use species and higher taxonomic categories as well. So for example a Great Egret would get the keyword Great Egret, (with Ardea alba as a synonym). Those would then be nested within Ardeidae, which would be nested within Birds, which is nested within Animals. I also add the location in a similar manner. For example Bosque del Apache is nested inside of Socorro co., which is nested inside of New Mexico. In addition I add various descriptive words depending on the image. A picture of a Great Egret catching a crayfish would get feeding, (with eating as a synonym), hunting, predator, aquatic, crayfish, etc. It also might get words that describe the scene such as blue sky, water, white, clouds, etc. Once the pictures have been edited and keyworded they get moved into numerical folders that started with Raw_001 and are currently up to about Raw_150 for me. Pictures are placed into these folders chronologically until there is almost 4.7 GB in a folder. At that point the folder is moved from my computer to my external hard drive and I also burn 2 DVDs of the folder that then reside at two separate locations, (home and work). This last step is kind of dated, since higher resolution cameras now allow for a relatively small number of photos to fit onto a DVD. I will likely modify this in the near future such that I am using two or more separate external drives to store the pictures in different locations. At any rate, because of the extensive keywording, I really don't need to keep folders by date, or location, or species, etc. Any picture I need can be quickly located with a keyword search.

Jun 16, 2017 at 10:51 PM

Bobg657
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Photo management for wildlife

Re Photomechanic: this program allows full size and enlarged views, keywording, star rating etc and is much faster than LR, it's used by many wedding and sports photogs to quickly identify keepers.

My usage is pretty simple, I insert the sd, drag it to the Photomechanic icon, tag my keepers in one pass, view only the tagged images and perhaps eliminate some of those as well. Viewing only the remaining keepers, I copy those to a temporary folder on my desktop which is imported into LR. This is usually about 10% of all shots.

The sd is then ejected and all files deleted in camera so I reuse the sd.

By doing this I only have keepers on my hard drives, others have never hit the hard drive and go away when the card is reused.

Jun 16, 2017 at 11:24 PM

bs kite
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Photo management for wildlife

Welcome Northmac

I am relatively new to FM.

For those who shoot a lot of wildlife, this subject you have chosen is perhaps the most needed and least discussed.

I will try to contribute, knowing that I may be one of the least efficient regarding post processing, filing strategy, etc.

Also, I have started to read your inputs and will go back to them. I am most interested in looking into this Photomechanic further. It must be able to go to 1:1 or I think it will be of no use for me. And I have known for some time that I really should learn LR more fully.

Currently I operate in Mac only. And that only because I hate malware and bugs, I like Applecare and I think these Mac laptops are more durable. I do not like the MAC OS, as much as the Winddows OS. I just had to make a choice.

Following is what I currently do to get through this arduous task we all have of pushing this load out of the way and filing it.......so that we can get back out to have more fun:

1. Right when I get out of the field...... Using "Finder" I Immediately "dump" the entire SD card onto a HD folder that I have pre-named. Once I have ascertained that this is done, I reformat the card.

2. Folder name is numerical (#1, #2 and so on), followed by DATE, PROJECT NAME and then KEYWORDS. I am currently using as many TAGS or KEYWORDS right in the folder name as I want to; i.e. currently, my new folder names can be very long.

3. I open LR and access the new folder and then inspect each image 1:1. It is here that I am able to delete most of the images. I may be doing this the slow way...not sure. But by going to 1:1 I am able to determine if the image is a keeper. If the eye is not sharp the image is dead right there. Regarding each image I keep, I ask LR to "Show it in Finder", whereupon I give it a color tag. After going through the entire folder, I go over to FINDER, access the folder, view images in the "LIST" mode......... highlighting all images that are NOT color-tagged and I delete them right there. This gives me pleasure because I have now greatly reduced the size of the folder I first dumped from the SD card into this new folder. This is the folder of RAW's that are now archived.

4. Now I have folders that have only my best quality NEF (Nikon RAW) in them. From here I go to PS CC (Photoshop in the cloud) or sometimes DXO Optics Pro Elite. Any images that go to DXO OP Elite are output in the .DNG format.

So currently, in the end I have archived only one RAW of any single image. I can access this image to do a high quality print if I want. From this "library" of RAW's I pull select images and keep a folder with a name something like this" "DOWNSIZED FOR WEB". Most of my images are "published" via the web and so must be downsized anyway.

In recent years I have largely stopped randomly shooting; i.e walkabout shooting. I do not have time. I am more of a nature photojournalist than a nature photographer. So that currently, I only shoot for my projects. I have two, maybe three projects going on throughout the year, depending on season. And I am finding that side projects develop from these. So there is no shortage of images and the themes increase over time. On my outings, I shoot about 600+ to 1200+ images. All are RAWS.

I have still not settled permanently into a filing system. I need to get more organized.

Before simplifying by numbering the folders (as mentioned above), I used a more taxonomical system. Example: I have a large section of folders (that need reorganization!) where (for example) I use such words as "Passerine"..... for all perching birds. Subfolders within Passerines would be AGF for American Goldfinch, and so on, with more common names. I keep it as simple as possible, only using Carl Linnaeus's taxonomical names for Kingdom, Class, Order, maybe down to the Family level......and that is probably it. As a scientist first, I may go back to this system, but it is going to require much brushing up. Besides, I know how to quickly access/verify any scientific name I need, and do not necessarily still see the need to use them in a filing system. I do not think I am going to back to it.

Also, with that old system, I had two folders for each image: A TIFF and a JPEG. I learned that this consumes far too much storage space. Currently, I store only a single RAW of each image. BTW, my latest HD is an 8TB Enterprise grade Toshiba from OWC. I keep two internal HD's in a Rocketstor dock that sits on the floor. The HD sitting beside the 8 is a 6. Admittedly, all my computing is done via this MacBook Pro. I like the portability and money is always a consideration

5. FILE NAME: Just lately, I have started to change the file name....just before I save it. Just before the ".NEF" and after the numerical part of the file name, I am now placing a CAPITALIZED keyword in there. This is probably just a common name of the organism. I believe this will greatly help me find any image in seconds by using "FIND" within FINDER and in the "FILE" dropdown. I think I am onto something. Maybe not.

Right now, that is all I can contribute.

Robert King

Edited on Jun 17, 2017 at 11:33 AM · View previous versions

Jun 17, 2017 at 09:44 AM

e6filmuser
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Photo management for wildlife

I shoot mainly macro but many kinds of subjects.

All (RAW and processed) are stored in "Documents" on my PC. They are in a folder "A Photography", the "A" to keep it on top.

Where location is important and/or the images are unsorted, they go into a dedicated, named folder in "A Photography". Subfolders are allocated as I sort/process further.

Plants, animals, fungi etc each have a master folder as a subfolder of "A Photography".
The idea is that I can eventually find any species in its own subfolder. Within that subfolder will be further ones for "Selected" and, eventually, within them, a folder with the processed ones.

My image file names have a summary of data, especially in those taken with legacy film lenses.

All are backed up externally.

Harold

Jun 17, 2017 at 11:07 AM

Jess_Sullivan
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Photo management for wildlife

Hi!

In Lightroom, (regardless of catalog) I always have a smart collection with a rule for "has adjustments" and "is .tif". This way, once I sort through my ID shots (quick, on the go crops and tuning), 3 stars (proper LR edits), and 4 stars (will be sent from LR to PS for real subject-level stuff, like lightening, ~.4px unsharp mask for the bird, bit of Gaussian blur for backround noise, etc) for the real keepers, so I can refer back to and export/organize only the photos I touched. (The .tif is for those photos that came back from PS)

Then, it is a simple matter of exporting these into the folders on my computer in the way I want (probably a bit different for each person, I do "ID", "High res" and "low res" exports, and then really good ones to a folder on my desktop in addition to the normal export destinations).

I never delete the raw photos, but will usually shepherd my good photos around into Catalogs with raws to easy access places (external drives- glyph and Drobo for me at the moment). I can move catalogs with (useless) photos into cheap cloud storage (OneDrive and amazon are my current choices for that, via free odrive network folders on my computer) then into cheaper still backup cloud storage (crash plan, etc).

I hope this helps. I found this flow to make sense for how I do my birds... I find keeping photos out of Lightroom- either via exports or catalogs with specific photo sets and raws folders- makes for less adobe headaches and faster clean up from my computer....
...Not to mention how easy it is to find the photos I really do care about.

Cheers!
-Jess

Jun 17, 2017 at 01:15 PM

psharvic
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Photo management for wildlife

I take 3 kinds of bird pictures. Those just to help with an ID when I get home are almost always tossed. Once ID'd I'm sure I can find far better examples on line including here at FM. I teach an Audubon ID workshop in Arkansas and have LR collections of local birds sorted by bird families that parallel the bird guides. (Thanks to several FM members who helped me with birds I was missing .) If I get a better collection pic the replaced pic goes in the trash. My third group is pictures that I feel are good enough for contests. In general, my thought is why save my second best pictures? Of course, it's occasionally hard to make a "which is best decision"- a nice problem to have

Jun 17, 2017 at 04:11 PM

NorthMac
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Photo management for wildlife

Bgorum – you keyword with some detail for sure. I too have gone away from DVD backup for the reasons you cited; also have heard of cases where old DVDs started to delaminate in the plastic.

Bob – thanks for the clarification on PM; I assume from your workflow that LR can see and honor all the ratings and keywords you enter in PM. Certainly LR is very slow to render 1:1 previews even on my desktop – on my travel laptop importing and previews is a go-out-for-supper wait.

Robert K – thanks for the welcome and yes, the responses here show that photographers have adopted many systems for file management and workflow, which is what I suspected since as you say this is rarely talked about the way gear is. My only comment on your process is that I’m not sure re-naming the files with the species in the name is going to add much; since you use animal name keywords in LR would this not be redundant?

Jess S – you certainly are making more creative use of the cloud than I am, at least for duplicate backup, and clearly use numerous LR catalogs as part of your organization system. I too use collections but likely not as efficiently as I could. Not sure what Adobe headaches you refer to - slow operation with large catalogs?

psharvic - your system clearly works in service of your teaching, which is great.

Overall these responses seem to show that many people have tended to rely, either entirely or as a component, on file folder organization in some fashion. I’m not sure that I could maintain or depend completely on this type of system for birds, if it needed to be taxonomic (but then I could never keep my collection of CDs organized either…). Hence my preference for a metadata based system and searchability. For my travel and landscape photos I can find, in seconds, for example, all photos of cathedrals in England, though I could not remember exactly what year or month my three trips there were. So I would hope to have similar instant access to wildlife photos – instant access say, to the best Great Blue Heron photos from any year, or the best bird shots from a specified National Park. These might be example questions to see how rapidly peoples' organization methods allow successful searches.

Jun 17, 2017 at 07:21 PM


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