Aperture or Lightroom Doesn’t Have to Hold ’em All
On Twitter this evening, I talked a little bit about how to handle twenty bajillion photographs and stay afloat. My thinking on this has been shifting quite a bit over the last year and has been greatly influenced by conversations with others about the shoeboxes (or filing cabinets if we were a bit more sophisticated) we used to keep our archives in. Those thoughts aren’t yet complete and I’m not ready to write the big treatise on how my workflow really works, but I’m far enough along to at least give a sneaky peek on one aspect of it.
What’s become obvious is that there’s a point at which you don’t want all of your photographs staring you in the face. You don’t even want them to surface in your catalog nor do you want them slowing you down when you search or browse. Yet, you don’t really want them totally out of your life. For any number of reasons—some of which make sense, and others which sound like the things a hoarder might say—you want to be able to dig back through those photos at a later date and maybe promote a photo that’s become more meaningful.
Aperture and Lightroom—both of which want to be the one true solution—don’t really help you with this on their own, at least not after some tens or hundreds of thousands of images stack up. As the photos continue to pour in, both Aperture and Lightroom start to loose their grace and can get downright unwieldy. But who’s to say that you have to let Aperture or Lightroom be the master of all your photos? The answer is that when it doesn’t make sense for you to let them run the full show, you don’t.
Here’s a very simplified illustration of my current catalog strategy:
The archive is, in effect, my shoebox. Everything goes in there. Every image that I take and import goes there. The images I’m currently interested in are referenced in Aperture where I group them into projects and albums. If I decide that an image isn’t working for me anymore, I kick it out of Aperture pronto. It just becomes an unreferenced file in the shoebox again. On the other hand, if I want to go digging for an image to add to a collection I’m making, I fire up Bridge or Photo Mechanic and go poking about.
As I’ve implemented this strategy, I’ve found it easier to start focusing on what I want to do: make groupings of images that go together that I can present as albums or portfolios. I can quickly toss aside everything I don’t want slowing me or Aperture down knowing that it’s all there to get back to later. Hey, isn’t that what these tools were supposed to be about in the first place?
Now, if you read this and think “Hey, just keeping everything in Aperture or Lightroom is working just fine for me”, then great! You’re not running into the same issues as I have and you should keep doing what works for you.
Follow up: I know this is just a glimpse and there are tons of possible follow on questions. I think it might take a book to answer ’em all. Also, please note that this is what works for me at the scale of my image archive. It’s not something I’d recommend at a level where your catalog weighs in at tens of GB. Finally, this is all in the service of the high order bit of image cataloging.
