As you may have gathered from my last post, I take a lot of pictures.  When school sports are in season, I might shoot between 1000 and 3000 images per week.  In my last blog post I described my two step system for sifting through all the images.  In this post, I’m going to describe more of the technology that makes processing this volume possible.

I keep track of my images in Adobe’s Lightroom product.  Lightroom serves two primary functions.  First, it catalogs the images for retrieval later.  Second, it allows me to perform non destructive edits to the raw images.  (Raw image processing is a topic for a coming blog post.  Stay tuned…)  Lightroom also has handy extensions for publishing to common social media sites.  I use this feature to publish directly from Lightroom to both Instagram and http://www.heckenlively-photo.com.

Unfortunately, sifting through pictures in the desktop version of Lightroom can be tedious.  Lightroom is a great product, but it has some performance problems.  If I am in a huge hurry, I apply my two pass method to the images using a tool called PhotoMechanic, before I import the images into Lightroom.  I have read that if you visit the press room at any NFL game, almost all of the laptops will be running PhotoMechanic.  The big advantage PhotoMechanic has over Lightroom is SPEED.  As I apply my rankings to the images in PhotoMechanic, it writes that information into what are called “side cart” files.  These are small XML files that reside on disk with the image files.  Lightroom automatically recognizes these side cart files, and the image rankings get applied in Lightroom during import.

If I have more time, I now use a relatively new tool in the Adobe suite, Lightroom Mobile.  As the name suggests, it is Lightroom for mobile platforms.  I use use Lightroom Mobile primarily on my iPad, but I have the app installed on my iPhone as well.  Lightroom Mobile requires an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to function.  There are two ways to move images into Lightroom Mobile.

1. Import the images into Lightroom Mobile directly on the mobile device.  This works with Raw images too, by the way.
2. Create a new collection in Lightroom Desktop with the “Synce with Lightroom Mobile” option enabled.

I typically use option 2 when I am going to review a set of images in Lightroom Mobile.  On a fast connection, Lightroom Mobile on my iPad is about as fast as PhotoMechanic on my desktop, and I can work on images “on the go”.  All rankings and edits applied via Lightroom Mobile automatically sync back to Lightroom Desktop via Adobe Creative Cloud, and vice versa.  I typically stick to just ranking my images in Lightroom Mobile, because my iPad does not have a calibrated screen.  The biggest downside to using Lightroom Mobile, is waiting for the images to initially sync into the cloud, which can take hours on a slow Internet connection.

Once I apply my rankings, and select the images for the final gallery, I prepare the images for the gallery in Lightroom Desktop.  

Lightroom Mobile has been a game changer for me.  For years, I took more pictures than I could review and publish.  Now I have a workflow that can keep up.