Thanks so much for sharing the info about your workflow. I’m working in Aperture and have come to the following process.

Every event, or outing, or whatever becomes a project in Aperture. I’ve got a couple of folders Personal, Work, etc that each have sub-folders by year. Then each project gets named Year-Month-Day-[Descriptive Name]. I know this may sound a little anal but it has made it very much easier to keep track of things for me.

I’ve been shooting everything RAW since moving up to an SLR a couple years ago. My current flow is to import photos into the Aperture library and store the RAW photo into the Aperture main library. This lets me work on the photos on the laptop wherever I happen to be. I generally go through the photos and do a first round evaluation where I quickly rate the photo as either 3 stars, no stars, or discard. This allows me to quickly get down to a batch of photos that are worth taking a second look at. From here I’ll up-rate and down-rate photos to get the final mix. I generally use the 3 star rating as my threshold for “publication”. Anything 3 stars and up makes the cut to end up in the web gallery or wherever.

I’ve been cranking through photos faster than the poor laptop drive can handle. To manage this I have a smart folder in Aperture that finds all photos that are more than 3 months old and are managed files instead of referenced files. This allows me to find everything I’ve shot that’s been on the laptop for a bit, and use the relocate masters command to move the original RAW out to pasture on a storage volume. Aperture is smart enough to create project folders on the target disk for everything so that I end up with a folder structure that looks pretty much like my Aperture library but is now outside of Aperture. All the metadata and tagging still live in Aperture. I should probably heed your advice to start exporting the XMP Sidecar.

But here is where I run into an issue. I have tried exporting the sidecar files with the RAW but I haven’t found a way to use the sidecar file with Bridge/Photoshop CS3. So right now I’m concerned that even if I were to export things that the XMP sidecar would end up doing me no good and I’d still need to have aperture and the main library database to get back to my files. Anyone out there found a way to get the adjustments out of Aperture and into Photoshop?

I’m using SmugMug for online sharing of things as well as using it as a sort of online and offsite storage repository. I’m still managing my own backups for the RAW masters but at least I know I’ve got JPG backups out there in the ether somewhere that I can go back to if I ever had a catastrophic local failure. I love SmugMug and with the Aperture plug-in it makes for a great workflow for me. My photos are up at http://kgmoore.smugmug.com/ for those who’re interested.

Thanks again for sharing your process and I’m looking forward to hearing any tips or tricks from others.

Kevin M.

More research is needed. I sound grumpy. For me, the real big reason to not use DNG for now is that I have to run a conversion on every image I want to store in DNG. That’s painful. I want cameras to shoot a DNG and ALL SOFTWARE EVER to read them.

I’m not sure there’s a reason to avoid using DNG, but I’m holding out. For a hero.

I’m terrible about backing up though. I’m pretty sure I haven’t plugged in the drive that I use with Time Machine in about 3 months. Bad girl. I know.

The #1 worst problem you will face is whenever you change your workflow. It seems like every program has a different way of handling metadata, keywords, and file organization.

One easy solution is Photoshelter, an on-line storage and archival solution.

Feel free to contact me if anyone has any specific thoughts/questions

FWIW — I use Aperture (and have just shy of a million images stored) and a few xServe Raid storage systems connected via Fiber to my workstation.

We have mirrored local disks which we backup to an external drive nightly. This is kept at home all the time and used for quick restores or as a convenient way to move large data sets between computers. Mozy is then used to back everything up online.

Mozy runs nightly as well (an hour or so after the in-house backup) and uploads everything we care about to their servers. It’s all encrypted both in-flight and at rest (they say they can’t get to your data at all). The first backup takes *forever* (as in weeks depending on the data set size). After that, though, you’re golden.

The best part to me is the price — $4,95/mo. for unlimited storage. We’re using about 300GB for photos and music with no complaints from them.

Disclaimer — I do NOT have any relationship with Mozy other than being a very satisfied customer of their service.

i am using aperture and am dealing with photo organization too. i am trying to figure out the best way to organize projects. by year? by subject? use them like albums?

using the rating system will help with off site long term archives. i haven’t figured that one out either.

i love these posts jon. thanks!