I know the feeling!! Before I made the switch to Lightroom, it was hard keeping all my pictures organized and I didn’t have a fast post-processing system going. RAW format is a larger file and uses more space, but the editing control and photo quality make it worth it to me.
I use Lightroom Classic CC.
Hm… 200 to 20 in 15 minutes, that’s not bad! I am considering Lightroom, but as I don’t have any regular income coming in for my photography, I hate having to pay for a regular expense… but then again, Lightroom is the industry standard that most everyone loves (except for the subscription). I’m considering ON1 as an alternative to Lightroom.
It is nice to know that I’m not the only one to get burnt out on swimming in unedited and unculled RAW files!
Just so you know, you don’t have to shoot raw. I don’t and know of another professional who doesn’t. With jpeg you need to nail your exposure, but shouldn’t we anyway? And honestly, I like the way my jpegs turn out better. I may shoot a RAW or two under certain circumstances, but that is it.
I shoot RAW+JPEG, and I am finding myself using my JPEGs more than my RAWs—especially because most of my pictures are of my little siblings and I don’t really need to edit each one to look amazing when my parents are content with their smartphones.
Maybe that’s my solution: to be okay with using JPEGs. When I shoot landscape or macros, though, I do want the capability to do a heavy edit—or when I do screw up an exposure, it’s nice to be able to do some rescue work. I use Apple Photos to hold onto my JPEGs; it’s fast, and I can do some basic edits in a clean, fast, intuitive workspace. It will work with RAWs, but I found myself unsatisfied when I did work with them (not enough advanced control—but maybe I need to give it another go. It could have been just me, and maybe I don’t need everything).
I’m thinking a fast RAW previewer like FastStone is a missing link in my workflow; but FastStone doesn’t work on my Mac. I’m trying FastRawViewer, but it’d be great if I could keep all of my organizing and processing in one program.
What is your current process for culling and organizing?
I take my photos in RAW+JPEG, and when I import my photos from the card, I put all of my JPEGs on my boot drive to live in the Apple Photos catalog. The interface is very simple to use and works like any Apple product—clean, but maybe a little oversimplified. My RAWs live on a cloned pair of external hard drives in a folder structure nearly identical to what you described.
Luminar 3 is a relatively new Lightroom alternative that links its catalog to an existing folder structure. I just point it to the external hard drive, and it pulls all the image information from that so I can cull and edit. I think Luminar may be one of the best RAW processors, but I’m finding its catalog is a bit clunky and immature. It takes four to five seconds for it to render a sharp preview of a RAW image, and that’s not conducive to fast sorting and culling.
Again, maybe I just need to learn to use it, but it’s pretty frustrating for me to try to organize anything (putting my photos on my internal 3TB Fusion Drive instead of my external HDDs didn’t seem to make too much of a difference).
I don’t know if you’ve heard of it before but it’s called Affinity photo.
Affinity is good for someone that doesn’t do too much editing but still needs all those great photo editing tools without paying a fortune.
YES!!! I do use Affinity, and that is my wonderful Photoshop alternative. It does a TON of editing for what it costs—and I believe it is closely on par with Photoshop. I am completely satisfied, and have very little reason to consider acquiring Photoshop in light of what Affinity Photo can do.
However, I’m still in need of a way to organize my RAW files… (if Serif—the company that makes Affinity Photo—comes out with something as close to Lightroom as Affinity Photo is to Photoshop, I think Adobe might have serious problems on their hands!).
Thanks everyone for your help so far! Any further discussion/ideas/answers would be very helpful.
@loganlamar