Photography is one venture that has an endless amount of opportunity and possibility. With these possibilities comes a tremendous potential for education and improvement.
Most of us are familiar with the educational routes available to us for improving our shoot styles, lighting, and other technical aspects of our photography. However, one of the things that can easily be overlook is that of organizing our work after we have finished shooting it. Now, this is a relatively simple subject. File organization and a post-production workflow may seem like fairly boring, rudimentary tasks, but that doesn't make them any less important.
Let's face it, as photographers, we are paid for our skill, and our skills take time. The more time you spend performing rudimentary tasks is time that you make less money. This quick video by Julia Trotti offers some great tips and suggestions for optimizing your post-production workflow.
Personally, I have found that my file organization methods are continuously a work in progress. When I first started photography, I created a pretty basic file structure and organization system. Over the years, that system evolved many times to accommodate for issues that arose throughout my career as a photographer. As my styles evolve, as my subject matter changes, and as I acquire new gear, my system for organization necessitates more improvements. Even though I've had my file organization system set the way it is for years now, I still found this video by Trotti to be enlightening. It gave me some ideas of things I want to implement and is definitely worth the watch.
I'm not sure why she even has lightroom in her workflow. The whole point of LR is for organization and minor edits. Why not just pick them in photo mechanic then go straight to photoshop/camera raw?
Yes its true LR can bit a bit slow when you have too many photos, but there is a benefit to being able to search and organize all your photo at the same time and utilize all that metadata. Then just right click into PS and boom back and forth as needed.
I don't even save my final JPGs after delivery. If I ever need to export them again. It's like 3 clicks and done.
I think a lot of people are trying to avoid doing the heavy lifting in Lightroom these days just because it is becoming or has been such a resource hog for a while now. An iMac with an external drive isn't going to help that speed either....
Her file-naming syntax could cause her problems in the future, particularly the use of spaces, periods and the "|" character. A better system is the one outlined by Michael Grecco here - https://youtu.be/1lutNrHI_ac
As a disorganized amateur I found this helpful. And her accent was delightful too!