Not shooting

So a client brings me a hard drive with 340GB of images, some 12,000 of them, various stuff that different people in the organisation have had shot by other photographers in 2009. The issue, only one folder of images has any metadata, the rest are simply in a series of 38 folders with generic names.

The job, for me to sort the images so that they can make sense of them, catalogue, add as much metadata as I can glean from the images, without going over the top, then upload to Photoshelter.

The tool I use, Apples Aperture 3.
The process
1. Copy the entire contents of the drive to one of ours so that the original is safe.
2. I create a new Aperture library on the drive and import all 12,000 images by reference in to this library.
3. I go through each folder look for any obvious generic description and keywords that can be applied to all of the contained images.
4. I sort each folder in list mode by date to see if there is a way of breaking the images up by the day they were shot on, for a number of folders Ii can do this.
5. For the folders that have been shot over one or two days I sort by grid and the create albums based on separate themes/topics within the days shoot.
6. Based on the albums that have been created I then look for descriptions and keywords that I can apply across all of the contained images.

After sorting I have 266 separate albums, an average of 45 images per lightbox.

From an archiving and historic perspective suddenly the images are of far more value.

I have to export each album separately rather than being able to just export all 12k images in one hit. The images we upload to photoshelter rather than being the high res are only 1400pixel, enough for a comp, word doc or presentation. The reason for this is that each high res image should be processed, colour corrected and retouched. Processing every image is just not feasible, so the client chooses the ones they want and they are then uploaded as high res. This allows for many more thousands of images to be stored online for the client to readily access. OK in the ideal world all the hires would be processed and stored online for the clients to access as necessary, the reality is though that the clients will only ever use some 10-20% of images shot and that they are not prepared to pay the premium involved in having all the images process or the additional costs associated with the extra storage and bandwidth.

For me the process has been very interesting, I am getting to see some great images from other photographers and to understand my clients needs a little more.