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M
markwill
Participant
March 26, 2017
Answered

Lightroom (desktop and mobile) workflow for managing images

  • March 26, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 612 views

I have just started using Lightroom in earnest (had it as part of my cloud subscription for years) and have some newbie questions about image management, sync, etc.

I currently have all my historical images in OneDrive folders and that has served me well. But there's a heavy manual process to organizing things and I am hoping that embracing Lightroom can improve things for me. My issues are around the image capture, review and categorization process.

  1. Upload/sync
  2. Review/prune
  3. Categorize.

Here's how I WANT to do things.

Step 1 (upload) can happen from my phone (Android) or camera (Sony A6300).

  • If it's the phone I want it to be totally automatic - take a picture and it uploads "somewhere" (a folder) without any manual step on my part.
  • For my camera, I am OK doing the sync when I connect to a PC via USB. But it still needs to be automatically sent to some folder as soon as I plug it in.

Step 2 (review) is where I look at all the images I have taken and delete the bad stuff. Before I start this step all my images (whether from phone or camera) are in some "To be reviewed"-type folder. IMPORTANT (as relates to the next step): I don't want to have to remember which ones I have reviewed. If an image is in the folder I am reviewing then it is, by definition, unreviewed. That means the review process includes some way of marking images as reviewed and getting them out of the "To be reviewed" folder.

Step 3 (categorize) is about building collections - both automatically and manually. An automatic collection would simply be something like year taken - that seems like an obvious of use of Smart Collections - except that means I can only see them on my PC from Lightroom (is that correct? - if so that's a real bummer!). I also want to be able to manually build collections like "Vacation in Rome" or whatever. These need to be organized and viewable in some way under the year in which is happened. This way I can easily browse, say, 2015 and see all the events that happened in that year.

Some of this seems doable - but I am blocked on a few aspects:

  1. What would the appropriate feature to handle the reviewed/unreviewed process in step 2?
  2. Is there a way to create a manual collection and have it browesable under a particular parent (the year)
  3. If I copy images from my camera, via USB, how do I ensure that the images are all automatically sync'd with the web after review (frankly, if I have to do this BEFORE review, that's OK but seems wasteful).

Hopefully it's implied from the above, but when all is said and done I want to be able to browse my images from my phone, neatly organized into year / event, etc. I have that now with OneDrive and I'm sure Lightroom can make things even better

Can Lightroom, in its various flavors, provide this? If so, what features are relevant here.

Thanks.

Mark

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Jao vdL

There are many ways in which to do the "reviewing" thing. Most people will use pick flags and filters for this. Julianne Kost from Adobe has some awesome free videos that detail a lot of this. There is one on selecting and picking images here: Lightroom 5: Select, Rate and Prioritize Your Images - YouTube

2 replies

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 26, 2017

LR/mobile has the option to automatically import any image you shoot with the built-in camera app. You do need to open LR when connected to wifi to make it sync to the Adobe CC cloud though (after which it will sync to your desktop). You can make it do this on a cellular connection but it is not the default to save you bandwidth. The LR camera app allows you to shoot raw on many recent phones which is absolutely amazing in how much better quality you can get than jpegs from the built-in camera app.

M
markwillAuthor
Participant
March 26, 2017

Cool! Yes, just ran through that and it all worked great. Took an image using the regular camera and it showed up on the web and, soon after, on the desktop version of LR, all without going anywhere near LR Mobile. Great stuff and that's a key part of my scenario covered. Thank you!

The RAW thing was news to me too - will check that out.

Regarding the "To be reviewed" workflow, what I think I will settle on is this...

. Have a smart collection looking for images that do NOT have the keyword "Reviewed".

. When I want to review recent images I either delete or associated that keyword with them, in which case they disappear from the smart collection

That would seem to work but this while idea of reviewing recently taken images seem such a common scenario that I am still wondering of Lightroom has some feature or concepts that specifically focus on this scenario.

Thanks again.

Mark

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
March 26, 2017

There are many ways in which to do the "reviewing" thing. Most people will use pick flags and filters for this. Julianne Kost from Adobe has some awesome free videos that detail a lot of this. There is one on selecting and picking images here: Lightroom 5: Select, Rate and Prioritize Your Images - YouTube

Just Shoot Me
Just Shoot Me
Legend
March 26, 2017

Not sure what you mean by Upload. In LR you Import images into the Catalog file. When doing that you can copy them from the camera and or memory card to a folder on your computers hard drive, yes even the One Drive folder.

Nothing is Automatic unless you take the images on the phone using the LR mobile app and it has been my experience it doesn't work every time. But then I don't use my phone for many images and rarely use LR mobile to take the images I do use my phone for.

From the camera you must Open LR then click the Import button.

You review images in the Library module and Delete from the Library module.

You can put images into a collection during the import process, Not recommended IMHO, or afterwords.

M
markwillAuthor
Participant
March 26, 2017

Thank you for the response.

By "upload" I guess I meant, from a LR perspective. I comment is more scenario-focused (I want an image uploaded to the web service) than app-focused

That's a bit of a drag about the automatic upload and the need to use the LR Mobile app. Right now (sans Lightroom) I just take an photo from the regular camera app and it is automatically uploaded to OneDrive.

I may be missing your point but the Library module doesn't quite address my scenario. If I just delete the images I don't want, the ones that I do want to retain just grow over time. I want to effectively prune the list to zero every time I review - images are either deleted or moved / filtered out. In short, when I review I want end up with a view that has no images in it, till the next batch I import. I am thinking this may be possible through some form of tagging where I either delete them or tag them - and the "To be reviewed" collection only shows images that have not been tagged. Something like that...

Thanks.

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