After I bought a mirrorless micro four thirds camera last year, I’ve entered the rabbit whole of media management.

I started by shooting in JPEG and dumping the images I liked into Google Photos, simple enough, right? After a while, for various reasons, I started shooting in RAW. But after filling my first SD card full of RAW files, I realized I needed a way to process them.

Lightroom seems to be the default choice, so I went with that. I know there are open source alternatives like Darktable, but I haven’t invested much time into exploring it.

Ratings

I cull my photos in waves. I first mark for deletion any photo that I consider throwaway; such as the focus is off, or I shot a dozen photos in rapid succession and I know I won’t even consider a few of them.

Then I start staring my photos. I’ll give any viable photo 1 star. Then I’ll go through all the 1 star photos and give 2 stars. If there are enough photos, I’ll repeat for 3 stars, and on rare occasions 4 stars.

Developing

I won’t touch on my editing process right now, that’s a whole separate skill which I’m still learning. But in terms of order of operations, only after culling my photos through ratings will I start developing and editing them.

Exporting

After I’ve developed my photos, I’ll export them to a more usable format like JPEG. I found a great Lightroom plugin called Jeffrey’s “Folder Publisher” Lightroom Plugin which can export JPEGs in the same directory hierarchy that you store your RAW files.

For example, I store my RAW files as such:

raw_photos/
├── 2020-5-20/
│   ├── img223.raw
│   ├── img224.raw
│   └── img225.raw
└──2020-5-23/
    ├── img228.raw
    └── img229.raw

The plugin on execution will export JPEGs as follows:

exported_photos/
├── 2020-5-20/
│   ├── img223.jpg
│   ├── img224.jpg
│   └── img225.jpg
└──2020-5-23/
    ├── img228.jpg
    └── img229.jpg

I’ll typically export to JPEG photos with 2 stars or higher. At this point, they’re ready for sharing.