Chapter 6. Managing your Gear, and your Photos, on the Road

Don’t forget to shoot pictures of the people you’re with, especially any guides you use. This photo of a mountain guide who was helping Reed Hoffmann and his group was taken in the Patagonia region near Bariloche, Argentina. Hoffmann underexposed the scene to get a rich blue sky. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

Digital photography has opened up new possibilities for the travel photographer. Eliminating film from the equation has meant lighter travel bags, fewer worries about such hazards as heat or airport x-rays, and greater freedom to adapt to changing photographic conditions.

But while digital photography liberates you from nearly every limitation of film, the digital workflow introduces new logistical hurdles. And while the freedom of digital allows you to shoot more images than ever, now you may return home with thousands of pictures.

You might think that it will be easy to locate that shot of the Buckingham Palace guard sneezing, but when a year has passed and your hard drive is cluttered with countless images, it will be more difficult than you think. What you need is a good, easy system for managing your images. Luckily, professional photographers have come up with simple solutions to the file-management dilemma. Back in your hotel room, you need only a few minutes to take care of a whole day’s worth of images.

Step by Step

Digital photography is so easy that you can almost forget you need to do anything after taking a picture. In the days of film, your pictures passed through a single system, the photo lab, to get developed. With digital there is no photo lab. The photographer is the one who processes and stores the images. And just as the photo lab technician followed certain steps to turn exposed film into photographs, the digital photographer needs to do a few things to turn the collection of data on a digital storage card into pictures.

The steps of digital “processing” are simple, and they’re always the same. Photos must be downloaded from your camera into your computer, named, browsed, and archived. Additionally, with digital photos you have the power to print and share your pictures in a variety of ways (covered in the next chapter) that film could never offer.

Figure 6.1a and 6.1b. Many photographers have traded one type of photo media—film—for digital media that has different requirements. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

Figure 6.2. Google’s Picasa, one of the most popular free photo browsers, offers many features. These shots were taken in shot in Yosemite National Park. (Photos by Reed Hoffman)

Building Blocks

There are a number of ways to carry out the steps of digital processing. Numerous programs available to help manage your photographs, but pros and consumers generally have different needs. Not every solution is right for every photographer. But remember, the steps are always the same, regardless of what programs you use.

To help you pick your solution, I’ll discuss the all-in-one approaches to digital image management, as well as the more advanced a la carte methods most pros use. First, let’s turn to the steps of digital photo processing (and why they’re important) to help explain why some programs are better suited to different types of users than others.

The Importance of Importing

Downloading your photos from your camera to your computer—also known as transferring, importing, or ingesting—is the first step in processing your digital photographs. Once you take a picture, you’ll need to move it from your camera’s media card into your computer. Downloading is a crucial step because you’ll need those images on your computer to work with them, and you’ll need to erase the card to take more pictures.

Figure 6.3. You can do your downloading to the computer wherever you happen to be if you’re using a laptop, even while camping in the Rockies. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

Whichever program you use will copy the images from your card to your computer’s hard drive. You might have to specify where they’ll go (depending on what software you’re using) so it’s a good idea to have an organizational structure in mind. That’s what naming is all about.

The Name Game

Creating a good file structure is the first step in being able to easily find your images. The file structure is the way you organize folders and files on your hard drive. You probably already do it with your word processing and email files.

Over time you’ll amass a large number of digital images on your computer, so it’s important to start with a good naming and organizing system. Most pro photographers use a variation of what I’ll call the “date/name system.” The idea behind using the date/name system is that you can locate files easily if you remember either when you took the photo, or what you called the shoot.

For example, inside your photos folder (called the Pictures folder by most Mac users and the My Pictures folder on Windows systems) will be a folder for each year, and inside that will be folders for each shoot, labeled with both a date and a name. The files inside that folder should have the same label as the enclosing folder.

For example, say that you shot the canals of Venice on June 26, 2005. A good naming structure would be Pictures>2005>062606_venice_canals. Files inside that should have the same name so they should be 062606_venice_canals_1.jpg, and so on. An example of a poor name would be Pictures>Italy.

Figure 6.4. A good naming system for your files will make them much easier to find in the future.

By naming your files and folders with both the date and a memorable name for the shoot, it’s easier to find them at-a-glance. You don’t have to use this exact system. There’s nothing wrong with naming the folder Venice_canals_june_26_2005 or any other variation, but it works best if you arrange your files in a method that integrates both the date and name of your shoot.

Meet the Press

Inside every digital photograph there’s hidden information. This is the file’s metadata. When you take a digital picture, the camera automatically records information about all the camera’s settings. Hidden inside each picture file is information detailing the shutter speed, f-stop, color mode, the date and time the photo was taken (if you’ve bothered to set them properly), and more. That information is called EXIF data and it’s in almost all every digital photos ever taken.

Figure 6.5. EXIF data is embedded in every digital camera file, and you can view it if you have the right software.

In you photo files is also something called IPTC data, information specified by the International Press Telecommunications Council, designed to help newspapers around the world ensure that a photo’s copyright information, captions, author credits, and more are correct when sent from news photographers to newspapers.

Most digital photography software lets you access this IPTC data, though the degree to which it can be edited depends on the sophistication of the program. Programs such as iPhoto or Photoshop Album only let you add keywords, while a more sophisticated program like Photo Mechanic enables you to add tons of information to the IPTC fields of your photo files.

Figure 6.6. Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits is one of the more powerful browsers. It gives you the ability to add or change IPTC information. (Photos by Reed Hoffmann)

Why is this important? By taking advantage of the IPTC fields, you can find images much more easily. Programs such as Photoshop and Photo Mechanic can look directly inside a file’s IPTC data, allowing you to see detailed technical information about a photo. The Macintosh operating system OS X Tiger can even search inside your photos for metadata, meaning, for example, that you could search all the photo files on your hard drive with the word “Venice” in the location field of the IPTC data.

Figure 6.7. Reed Hoffmann: “By doing a search for ’Fallesen,’ I was able to quickly find the photos of the Fallesen family we hiked with in the Rockies a few years ago. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

The process of adding information to files is called captioning, and although it’s an optional step, it’s important. Programs like Photo Mechanic allow you to batch-caption and batch-rename images while downloading them, saving time and improving future productivity.

I’m Just Browsing

Perhaps the easiest part of the process is image browsing. Browsing your images is the digital equivalent of flipping through prints or scanning a proof sheet, but with more power. To do so, you’ll want a tool that lets you look at your images individually or as a group of thumbnails; allows you to rate or rank your images (to separate the great shots from the stinkers); and allows you to rename or recaption your images.

Figure 6.8. Many people find Adobe Photoshop Elements’ browser, called “the Organizer,” to be all that they need.

Some programs keep track of all of your photos, which enables you to find them by date groupings or by searching for keywords or captions. Many programs use the browser interface as the gateway to the rest of the program’s functions. Find an image in the browser and then click on a button to send it via email, for example.

Nip and Tuck

Figure 6.9. A good organizer, or browser, will let you launch a selected photo directly into the editor of your choice for touch-up work and cropping. (Photos by Reed Hoffmann)

The editing stage is an important part of the workflow process, even if it’s just used for redeye removal, cropping, minor retouching, and color adjustment. Most programs integrate some editing features into the browser, while allowing you to open the image in a more powerful stand-alone photo editing program if you wish.

Shares Well with Others

Sharing your images is an important part of the digital imaging workflow. One of the chief advantages of digital photos over film is the ease with which pictures can be sent around the house, or the world.

We’ll cover image sharing in the next chapter, but any good photographic tool will be full of ways to get your photos in front of family and friends no matter where they may be.

Working with a Safety Net

Ask anyone to name the things they’d try to save if their house was on fire and chances are they’re going to mention the family photo album. Computers, cameras, and TVs can all be replaced, but photographs are fragile, priceless, and easily destroyed.

At least that was the case with film. Digital photographs can live nearly forever, and they needn’t be relegated to a single computer. In fact, the more locations you stash copies of your digital photos, the safer they’ll be.

That’s’ why the backup stage (also known as archiving) is so important. It safeguards your photos against digital extinction. Any good program will let you make copies of your photo files with a click or two.

You can never, ever have enough backups. One of the reasons that it’s such a good idea to bring along your laptop when you travel is that it makes archiving on the road so much easier. You can use its built-in CD or DVD burner to make copies of your files the same day you shoot them, and connect small, portable external hard drives to your computer via the USB 2.0 and FireWire connections.

Figure 6.10. Portable hard drives are small and easy to take with you. They’re available with both USB 2.0 and Firewire connections. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

In addition to photographs that you have stored on your computer’s hard drive, you’ll want to stash several copies of those photos elsewhere. Ideally, at least one copy should be stored at a location other than where you keep your computer.

Figure 6.11. A digital camera and a computer open doors to new ways of sharing and storing your photos. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

Here’s an example of a typical photographic backup system:

• Each image is stored on your hard drive.

• Your main computer hard drive is automatically backed up daily by an external hard drive. This will save your files if something should happen to your computer, like a hard-drive crash or a blown power supply, both of which happen more often than you think.

Figure 6.12. Several large hard drives can store every photo you’ve ever shot. (Photo by Michael Schwarz)

• You make regular DVD or CD copies of your images, and any other important data, and store them someplace besides your house. This will protect you against catastrophic loss of both the computer and the external drive (think fire, flood, or theft). Take these to a friend’s house or put them in a bank safe deposit box—or anywhere that’ll escape a catastrophe that would destroy your first set of backups.

Figure 6.13. The ease of backing up your photos on CD or DVD makes it a great way to keep your precious memories safer than ever. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

When you’re on the road, it’s not easy to transfer copies of your CDs to a friend’s house, so mail them home instead. If something should happen to your computer and backups while you’re traveling, you’ll arrive home to an envelope full of images.

Figure 6.14. It’s common to find Internet cafes around the world where you can burn your images to disk, and then mail them home. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

Middle Management

Now that we’ve tackled the main steps involved in managing your digital photographs, let’s look at the ways to carry out these steps.

There are two choices: Use a consumer photo software package as an all-in-one solution, or perform different tasks with different programs. The choice is up to you. Each system has pros and cons. We’ll look at the different management systems along with their advantages and disadvantages, and then sample workflows under each system.

Figure 6.15. It does no good to have a wonderful photo if you can’t find it when you need to. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

Taking the Easy Way Out

There are a number of one-stop software solutions for image management. Pick one of these tools, and you can skip right along to the end of this chapter ; you’ll have a pretty good picture management system.

Several companies make programs that act as big photographic organizers. Apple’s iPhoto, Adobe’s Photoshop Album, Corel’s Paint Shop Photo Album, ACDSee, and Google’s Picasa are some of the heavy- hitters in the market. These programs allow users to organize and find their photos, print images, order things like books and mugs with photos on them, and create archives.

Figure 6.16. iPhoto is a browser and simple editing package that comes installed on every Mac sold, and has basic cataloging abilities. (Photos by Reed Hoffmann)

Best of all, these packages are relatively simple to use—insert a media card into a card reader (or plug in the camera—but you remember that it’s faster and less of a battery drain to use a reader, right?). The pictures load into the program, organized by date—if you’ve configured the software to do this. They don’t all do it automatically.

So, if these programs can do so much (and at such a low cost; several of them are free), why would anyone use anything else? Why is it that the pros usually avoid these programs?

The chief problem with these photo organizers is that they’re too simple, taking several important choices out of the hands of the end user. And once you move your photos into these programs, it’s hard to get them out again because they become part of a library that’s organized on your hard drive in a way that makes sense to the program but might not be clear to the photographer.

Figure 6.17. Many programs, such as iPhoto, have their own system of keeping track of photos, and it isn’t always easy to find where they’ve hidden your pictures. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

The first big problem has to do with the organization of files. These programs are designed to put pictures in a hard-drive folder structure that makes sense to the program, not to the person using it. As a result, your photos can be stored several layers of folders deep, using a cryptic naming system, along with files used for things like displaying slideshows or making archives. Any photos you want to locate in your library have to be accessed via the interface of the program. No poking around in your files to find the picture you took in front of the Pyramids.

This sounds like a great time savings, but really it can slow down a photographer with lots of pictures. Let’s say that you traveled to France in May of 2004 and took beautiful shots of the Eiffel Tower. If you’ve got your files neatly organized on your hard drive, you simply open the folder called something like 052004_Paris_Trip to find your shots. If you used one of the all-in-one packages, those pictures would be impossible to find on your hard drive. Instead you’d need to open the program and hope that you remembered to make a galley of the images. Or you’d have to do a search for all photos taken in May 2004. Want to move your pictures to a newer computer or a larger hard drive? If you don’t copy over the folders from an all-in-one program exactly the way the program requires, you might have to re-index all your shots.

Another big issue crops up the moment you start to use these programs, during file downloading. Not being designed for the professional photographer, these applications often skip right over the crucial file naming and IPTC captioning step. IPTC captioning is an important way to add data to your photographs, making it easy to find them later. With an all-in-one program, at most you’ll only be able to add a trivial bit of metadata, like a keyword. And you probably won’t be able to search by important details, such as camera model, timestamp, exposure information, or any of the data in a photo’s IPTC or EXIF information.

There aren’t many issues with archiving with all-in-one programs, since most give you the ability to burn CDs and DVDs from your photos at the click of a button. What’s more, you simply need to copy the program’s main folder full of images to an external hard drive to backup the whole thing.

Where these programs do really excel though is in their photo-sharing capabilities. These programs usually offer you the option of ordering books, prints, and sometimes things like calendars or mugs, or creating them yourself; allow for the creation of CD and DVD slideshows; and enable you to send pictures via email or publish them to a Web site.

Pick One from Column A

Instead of relying on a single program, professional photographers usually turn- to a handful of specialized tools to get the job done, according to their individual working style.

Often photographers will use a combination of two to four programs to work with their images, each designed to handle one or more tasks with precise functionality.

Some of these programs overlap a bit in the workflow process. For example, Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits provides fantastic downloading tools, is a wonderful caption program, and includes one of the fastest browsers available. It also allows you to have up to 16 contact sheets open at once. Its sharing tools are good, but not great, and it offers limited archiving tools.

Figure 6.18. Photo Mechanic is one of the best tools for downloading and browsing images, but isn’t designed as an archiving program.

Photoshop CS2, the heavy-hitter photo-editing program, has nearly no downloading features, but includes batch renaming, metadata editing, and more through a companion tool called Bridge (which can be slow). Sadly, Photoshop has no archiving or sharing features to speak of.

Finally, image browsing and archiving programs like iView Media-Pro and Extensis Portfolio have serviceable downloading features, good browsing and captioning, and very good file-sharing features, but their interfaces are designed for the image-archiving professional, not the casual photographer.

Figure 6.19. Portfolio, by Extensis, is one of the more powerful programs, but that power comes with an extensive, sometimes intimidating interface. (Photos by Reed Hoffmann)

Each of the programs mentioned (and many programs not on this list but still equally qualified) started life designed to tackle a single part of the digital workflow process, and added more tools in related areas as they grew. So far, no program has been written from the ground up to specifically address the needs of the photographer, from shutter release to archiving.

As a result, photographers often switch from program to program in the digital workflow. It’s typical to see someone shuttling between programs a few dozen or a few hundred times a day. Still, this is more efficient than turning all of one’s photo editing choices over to an off-the-shelf program because it gives the photographer complete creative control.

One professional photographer I know explained his preferences this way: “I want the best tools for the job—he best for downloading, browsing, and organizing (Photo Mechanic); the best for editing (Photoshop, because of its color management); and the best for archiving (Portfolio or iView).”

A Typical Situation

Ok, now you’re totally confused. You’ve got two paths for your digital workflow--one that’s easy but not the most powerful, and one that’s more complicated, but more complete. Which programs are the best?

Figure 6.20. You love the photo you’ve shot, now what do you do with it? You need a workflow that makes your life simple. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)

It’s a lot easier than it might seem to choose the right path (see the sidebar “Choices, Choices, Choices” for some software starting points). And remember: You can always change your mind in the future, but if you do you’ll either have to import all your photos into an all-in-one program or export them, rearrange, and re-caption them.

Ask yourself, “How involved do I want to be in this process, and how many photos do I shoot?” If you don’t shoot a large quantity of photos, you won’t need a powerful workflow. If you prefer to concentrate on the photographic aspects of your travel photography (everything that happens in front of the lens), then the simple solution is best. But if you read this chapter dying to know which program you should use to get the most out of your IPTC captioning, then you’re a candidate for the specialized approach.

Figure 6.21. Paint Shop Photo Album is one of the many good all-in-one packages available. (Photos by Reed Hoffmann)

Figure 6.23. No matter what software you decide on, the important thing is to enjoy your trip and come home with memorable photos. (Photo by Reed Hoffmann)