Jaysen Marais

Until recently my digital photography ‘workflow’ (such as it was) has been comically under-thought:

1. Take photo, download images (using canon software) to mac and wipe CF card.
2. Import images into iPhoto 6 then:
   • Battle against iPhoto’s terrible data-entry interface (helped slightly by Ken Ferry’s great Keyword assistant for iPhoto).
   • Complain bitterly when I realized that iPhoto does not write EXIF/XMP, instead it keeps metadata in own proprietary database.
   • Lament iPhoto’s ignorance of Geo-tagging (storing latitude and longitude in photos to allow them to be represented on maps).
3. Avoid backing up iPhoto library (not so straight-forward) whilst panicking that i’d lose my photos to a disc failure.
4. Ignore requests to email photos due to effort required (we all do it!) or resize and email if feeling keen (rare).
5. Occassionally upload tiny subset to facebook (and receive angry-mails from non-facebookers who can’t see the images).

The New way

• Signed up for flickr pro account. $25/year for unlimited storage/bandwidth etc.
• Downloaded Lightroom (metadata editor, neat tone curve editor).
• Downloaded PictureSync. It turns iPhoto data into EXIF/IPTC/XMP/Spotlight tags, pulls lat/long from google earth (optional) and uploads (full-size) photos flickr. Also plays nice with lightroom. Great rules engine (for fixing metadata).



• Added My Flickr app to my facebook profile, canned default photo app.

The new status quo

1. Images metadata now embedded in images (where it ought to be) instead of in an app’s database.
2. Photos backed up (hurrah) in the cloud (even better) at full resolution/quality with powerful privacy control.
3. Can view/search/share entire photo library over web (including all metadata).
4. Friends/family can download images (configurable) in a variety of sizes without any additional effort on my part.



5. Ready-made RSS (and GeoRSS) feeds of my images thanks to flickr (friends and family can subscribe).
6. My Geo-tagged photos can be viewed on ready-made map UI. Cool!
7. Significantly more web 2.0 street-cred (easy on the 2.0 cynicism people!)

So next time someone asks me to send them a copy of a photo, there’s now a more-than-slim chance I may actually do so.

Next on my list is getting my G7 and my new GPS working together to automatically geocode my images.