My Workflow

My workflow for processing pictures and eventually publishing them to the web via Flickr involves several steps, and I'm trying to think of ways to improve it.

First, I import my pictures from my camera to a folder through Image Capture, a utility that comes standard on the Mac. If I spent time playing around with my camera and have some obvious junk images, I'll delete them from this folder.

Second, I import these files from that folder into Aperture, Apple's raw editor and photo organizer. Here I reject bad, uninteresting, and duplicate photos, process the good ones (cropping, color correction, exposure adjustments, etc), and enter image names.

Third, I export the images from Aperture into another folder and then import them into iPhoto. Here I rate the images, add keywords to them (type of image and who is in it), identify faces (iPhoto '09 added a facial recognition feature, but it usually fails to identify the person so I have to do this manually).

In the fourth and final step I export the iPhoto event to Flickr.

This process seems like too much work because I'm maintaining separate photo libraries in both Aperture and iPhoto. Aperture can import pictures directly from iPhoto, but the reverse isn't possible.

To make my life easier, I need to remove either iPhoto or Aperture from my workflow. Aperture is the only real choice for me of course because it has more features for a serious amateur photographer such as myself.

However iPhoto has several useful features that Aperture lacks. The ability to organize photos by faces is really cool, though like I mentioned earlier it isn't perfect and I'm already keywording my pictures with who is in them. Also iPhoto has a built-in export to Flickr; I can do this in Aperture as well but I have to purchase a third-party plugin.

Aperture is overdue for a refresh, and I'm sure Apple is getting close to releasing version 3.0 even though Apple is really good at keeping new software releases secret, so it stands to reason that some of iPhoto's features will be included in the next release. Flickr export is a no-brainer, though I'm not sure about facial recognition which might be seen as more of a consumer oriented feature.

Moving off of iPhoto entirely is a scary thought to me, primarily because of the untold hours I've put into organizing my photo library with it, which today stands at 3,566 pictures. Instead of going down the path of importing everything into Aperture, I think I'll keep my older pictures in iPhoto and manage newer pictures with Aperture. The natural cutoff between the two would be anything shot since I got my first SLR in April 2009.

Hopefully by spending less time doing tedious work on the computer I'll end up spending more time taking pictures.