A couple of my previous posts have been devoted to my photo selection process.  What does it take to get a group of images ready for presentation on http://www.heckenlively-photo.com? 

As we have already discussed, I use Adobe Lightroom to keep track of my images.  Lightroom stores the photo information in catalogs.  If you are an IT geek, think database.  In fact, I have read that Lightroom uses SQLite under the covers.  Lightroom supports using multiple catalogs, and the topic of one catalog vs. many is a topic of some debate among photographers on the Net.  Personally, I find it most convenient to keep a master catalog of everything.  This gives me a single place to lookup all images.

I have close to half a million images cataloged in my main catalog, plus the main catalog contains all the collections I have synced with Lightroom Mobile.  This all tends to make Lightroom a bit pokey, so editing images in the master catalog can be a bit slow.  The way I work around this is by saving my selected images into a working catalog.  I open the working catalog in Lightroom, edit the images, and then I re-import the images from the working catalog back into the main catalog.

This next part might come as a surprise for some of you.  The images posted on http://www.heckenlively-photo.com usually only receive a rough edit.  Lightroom has features for editing images as a batch.  Things like color and exposure are usually batch processed.  The only individual edit I usually do is cropping.  It takes a trip through photoshop and about 15-20 minutes of extra work to take an image from rough edit to fully polished gem.  I simply do not have time to do this with every image posted to my site.

(Print sales are an exception to this rule.  I plan on discussing more about how this works in a future blog post.  If you want to help support the site, occasional print sales help offset the ongoing costs for operating the site.)

As mentioned in a previous post, Lightroom has facilities for publishing directly to various social media sites, and I host my photo site on Smugmug.  I use a Lightroom plugin to publish directly to Smugmug.  The Smugmug gallery is just another collection in Lightroom with some additional properties.