[KPhotoAlbum] Streamlining my workflow

[Robert Krawitz]

I'd like to find a way to streamline my workflow (and see if anyone
else has a similar situation, which I'd think is quite common).

I photograph a lot of basketball and (American) football games for the
school I went to years ago.  I also shoot the occasional wedding.  I
typically wind up with 1500-2000 frames per game.  A couple of times
I've had multiple events in one day and wind up with closer to 4000
frames.  So everything I can do to streamline the experience is
welcome.

My usual workflow is as follows:

1) Download photos.

2) Read them into kpa.

3) Do an initial scan to knock out everything that's not potentially
   usable (out of focus, lighting bad, view blocked, whatever).  This
   is usually 20-25% of everything.

4) Do a second scan to find the images that I do want to use.  For
   games, this is typically 250-500 frames (more for football, fewer
   for basketball).  For weddings, this will usually be just about
   everything that's left.

5) Copy them out of kpa.

6) Post-process (crop if need be, shrink image size if they're going
   on the web).

7) Upload to my web site or copy to a flash drive for distribution.

How I

1) Download photos.  I have a script I've written to extract the shots
   from the memory card(s) and stick them in the appropriate
   directories.  This can take a little while, but only in the sense
   that 10 GB of data doesn't transfer instantaneously, and there's
   probably very little I can do to optimize this.

2) Fire up kpa, let it read in the new images and build thumbnails for
   them.  This again is time consuming.  It takes longer than
   downloading the photos.  It takes longer because kpa has to read in
   the "bad" shots as well as the good ones, but I don't see an
   obvious way around that.

   At this point, I also apply a keyword (key phrase, really) for the
   event I'm cataloguing.

3) This step is tedious.  I do it by tokening each bad shot with "K"
   and afterwards deleting everything with that tag.  This
   unfortunately means that for the shots I eliminate I have to use
   key strokes -- K and space -- which slows things down a bit.  I've
   been thinking I'd like a way to apply a token and move on in one
   keystroke, but it occurred to me that I could simply hit the delete
   key in the viewer, which removes the image from the current image
   set.  At the end, I could apply a token to all of the remaining
   images, and then select images with the keyword that don't have the
   token as the ones I want to get rid of.

4) This step is also tedious; I do it the same way.

5) The new-ish right click to copy images is very useful here.
   Everything else is done outside of kpa.

I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on this...

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

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