Original subtitles

So, workflow.

How images and files move through the system.

And before we start, I just want to

say this.

You have a duty of care to your

clients.

If you're a professional photographer, you have a

level of professionalism that I would expect you

to deliver on.

And image security and safety is absolutely one

of those basics, regardless of how good or

bad your work might be.

As a minimum, clients should expect their images

to be as safe and as secure as

possible.

In this episode, we're going to work through

exactly what I use from the second I

finish a wedding, right through to delivery and

archiving.

Now, if you're new to this industry, or

you've never really thought about this process before,

I'm going to suggest you do this first

and sketch it all out.

I want you to visualize it like a

flow chart.

And at each stage, ask yourself this, what

happens if?

And it might be grim to think like

this, but you need to think of worst

case scenarios at each stage of the process,

such as what happens if my van bursts

into flames?

Okay, that's probably not going to be relevant

here.

But what about if your bag gets stolen?

Where are the backup cards?

What happens if someone breaks into your house

and steals your car, which has your backup

drive in?

What happens if that hard drive with your

rules on just decides to go to sleep

forever?

You get my thinking, right?

Also, it's worth noting here that there's more

than one way to skin a cat.

Sorry to all the cat lovers out there.

But what I mean by this is your

setup may and probably will differ from mine.

You may prefer a different program to the

ones I use, or have something up your

sleeve I don't know about yet.

But this is my setup, take from it

whatever you wish, but it's yours to decide

on and configure.

Okay, so you've seen the level of my

drawing ability before.

So you know not to expect a piece

of art here.

But I do think it's really important to

just in order to visualize the system and

the workflow, if we just sketch out each

step one by one.

So we're going to start off just by

showing you central kind of hub, which will

just be the iMac.

Okay, so that is the that is the

main central station that I use in the

office.

And stage one will be to take these

two SD cards.

There's two more here because these are the

backups, shoot dual cards and backup to camera.

So one and two.

And these are 512 gig cards, I don't

swap out during the day to shoot on

two big cards, and then back those up.

So stage one is to get them into

the iMac.

And then over to a storage system, which

is a five bay Drobo.

And this holds about 40 terabytes of hard

drive in it.

And this is stage two.

So all of those two cards and these

these cards are all kept separate until I

backed everything up and everything is safe and

secure.

So they will stay somewhere else.

And these will be in the cameras in

the office.

Now, once they're on the Drobo, and they

are in a kind of just like an

image dumps folder where everything just gets dropped

into the next stage to happen.

And before I do anything else for do

any culling or any of any sort, is

that stage three, these get backed up to

an external Lassie drive.

So this is a two terabyte.

And this is my external backup.

Okay, and that goes off site.

Okay, the next thing to happen is for

I will call the images on the Drobo.

And I'll move them into a completely separate

folder.

So I do this on the Monday after

a wedding, if I shot a wedding on

the Saturday, I've come in on the Monday,

I'd get everything backed up.

And I would call it straight away, I

don't wait six, seven weeks to call it

I go, I go through the entire set

first thing on the Monday.

And those images then get moved to a

new folder structure.

And I'm going to go through the folder

structure in the next video, when we look

at doing a live kind of demo walkthrough

of the entire process.

But we then use a program called chrono

sync.

And chrono sync is going to take that

folder, the library and ready Rawls folder, and

it's going to back it up to another

drive that sits next to my computer.

This is about eight terabytes.

And this is this is what I would

call my working backup.

So the Drobo holds all of the files,

it holds my image dumps, it holds the

library and ready Rawls, raw files, I'm going

to edit the last two terabyte is the

external one that holds all of the files

and that stays away from the office.

And then chrono sync backs up to the

Lassie eight terabyte.

And it does that because if I was

coming to the office one day, and the

Drobo just decided not to turn on, I

would potentially have to go back through my

external drive, and I'd have to recall those

weddings that I've not yet started working on.

So worst case scenario, if the Drobo doesn't

turn on, I can just plug in the

Lassie eight terabyte and everything or the folder

structure for those cold images remains the same.

Okay, next stage.

So that folder of Lightroom ready raw files.

This is stage number six now.

They all get imported into Lightroom.

Okay, and in Lightroom, we build smart previews.

So smart previews act as my online backup

for those images, because smart previews, and I'm

going to apologize about my writing.

They're pretty shocking.

And those smart previews allow me to be

able to export all of those images within

that catalog at 2600 pixels on the long

edge, without needing to see the raw file.

So worst case scenario, all of this was

to disappear.

The iMac died, the Drobo got stolen, the

hard drives packed up, whatever it might be,

everything disappeared, I could go and buy a

new computer tomorrow, access my Dropbox account, open

up Lightroom, and still be able to export

every single one of those images at 2600

pixels wide on the long edge without having

a single raw file on a hard drive.

So that is my absolute worst case scenario.

And that also, so in fact, I should

have said this earlier, that sits within Dropbox.

So there you go, there's a box for

you.

So that sits online in Dropbox Pro.

And that also then means that if I

want to go and sit in a coffee

shop, or I go traveling, or I'm on

a plane, wherever it might be, I can

if I want, I can access that folder,

and I can edit on the go.

All I need to do is to make

sure that the catalog syncs back up to

Dropbox and back to my iMac before I

start to export those images.

And then the very final step, number seven,

is that every year at the end of

every year, all of those images, all of

those selects, the slideshows, the catalogs, the Lightroom

Ready Raws, all get archived.

And they stay on another hard drive in

the back of the office.

And they also stay online in their client

gallery.

So once the client galleries are up, everything

gets archived and sits on another drive at

the end of every year.

And that is it in a nutshell.

So on the next video, what we're going

to do is we're going to walk through

this setup.

But hopefully just seeing it kind of scribbled,

jotted down, gives you a little bit of

an idea and insight into how it's built.

Yeah, let's do the walkthrough next, shall we?