Note: I have been relatively busy of late and I've been constantly revising my workflow and thus these posts. Hence the break in between updates. Still working on getting it dialed in. With Adobe's recent move towards punishing perpetual license holders I imagine alternatives will be getting some more attention.

Now we're ready to so some actual photo work. The first step in any photographic workflow is importing, organizing and tagging. Personally, I prefer to keep my photos organized on the filesystem in lieu of using any sort of albums or collection features of a particular software. This is for a couple of reasons but the main one is to remain independent of whatever development package I'm using. If Aperture and iPhoto have taught us anything it's that these things are moving targets and it's probably not wise to bolt yourself down to any particular application. Most operating systems and desktop environments support meta data in some fashion so in a lot of ways the organizing side of a lot of these applications is a bit redundant now. Mostly Lightroom, Aperture, Darktable, etc just add a GUI that's better suited to managing photos than the file manager built into your OS.

The next little bit is going to be pretty OS independent. It's also my personal way of doing things. This might not work for you or it might not make any sense. That's fine. I organize my photos into directories based upon a few criteria. Mainly I separate them out by either what type of job they were, if they were part of a series or a project or just random day to day snapshots. For example I'll have a Photos directory with sub-directories called 000_Projects, 001_Screenshots, 002_Clients, 003_Models_and_Tests, 004_Photos_by_Year. Inside of those directories I'd have directories named after the clients, job, date, or other criteria. From there I just copy the files over like any other document. After all RAWs and JPEGs aren't any different than other types of files.

Some people like to rename files off the camera, I don't do that. I worked with other photographers on jobs or as a second shooter so I have my camera doing it's own custom naming with my initials (eg LGH_XXXX.NEF). I generally don't use something like Photo Mechanic or Rapid Photo Downloader to cull or backup my files either as I'm generally set into my current workflow. However do recommend giving Rapid Photo Downloader a shot if that's your thing. My shooting style is more deliberate instead of spray and pray so generally don't have many photos to throw out when I get back to my desktop. However, I've used Lightroom for this purpose and continue to use Darktable to cull. Again, this may not be ideal if you generate a ton of images per assignment/vacation/outing/whatever. For whatever reason I like to shoot like I still have a roll of film in my camera and I don't fill up cards.

My next step involves tagging the images and applying meta data. In the case of RAW files Darktable write this information out into an XMP side car file. Lightroom will do the same thing, but you have to turn on that option. I prefer this to storing the metadata in a monolithic library as it's more portable. Darktable has pretty rudimentary metadata editing support but it gets the job done. The presentation could be a little more polished in my opinion and support for a few other fields added. Hopefully more refinements come in future versions. The lighttable module is probably the weakest point of the software right now, but it's still very usable and highly customizable.

Darktable has a few presets for metadata. I started by using one of the Creative Commons options, fill in my name for the creator, and import from there. In the metadata panel you can customize the defaults and create your own presets if one of the defaults doesn't cover you. Unfortunately Darktable does not seem to support the full IPTC Creator fields as of the writing of this post. At least I haven't found anywhere to editing things like the address, phone number and site address fields. However, I simply put my contact info in the tags including my website. Not so much for preventing infringement as for directing people to my site from images they find on places like 500px and Flickr that display the tags. Other than that I don't go crazy with tags. It's definitely one of those less-is-more things. I limit it to 10-15, usually including the subject, name of the client, location, etc. All of this works just like that other commercial product everyone else uses.

Hopefully that was helpful and not too rambling. I keep updating and revising this workflow as I go so it's taken a while to get this all written down. Next up I'll dive into RAW development. That will be more about Darktable and not necessarily specific to Linux as well.