Quick Tip - Simplify file selections at import.
Visit: Trekabout
Often when we are travelling we have limited space and weight restrictions. I always travel with a laptop but sometimes I may leave the external hard drives at home and rely on my SD and Compact Flash memory cards for image safety until I return home. Having conducted many, many photography workshops and tours I can safely say that there are a lot of people doing the same thing.
One of the issues that arises from this practice though is having multiple shoots on the memory card. My normal practice when at home or carrying an external drive is to upload my images to my laptop via Adobe Lightroom, backing up to the external drive. I can then safely format my memory card ready for the next shoot.
Now back to having multiple shoots on the same memory card. By the way, it may not always be when traveling. You might shoot a sunrise at the beach in the morning and then go off to the rainforest for a fungi macro shoot and then photograph some birds later that afternoon. Three very different shoots on the same day. Completely different naming and keyword requirements.
Those of you who have been on one of my extended tours or attended my two day post processing boot camps wil recall that my preference for file naming includes a description of the shoot (added by way of a Lightroom preset including custom text when the images are imported). I'm sure you can see the problem. Three shoots require three three different names and a variety of different keywords.
So what's the solution. Whilst in the import dialogue it is possible to deselect all the images and then make a selection of the images you wish to import. You left-click on the first image, find the last image, hold down the shift key and left-click that image. All the images between the first and the last will now be highlighted. You then just need to left-click in one of the little boxes on the top left hand side of the thumbnail and all the little boxes will receive a tick. Everything with a tick will be imported and renamed as per your 'Custom Text'. You can also add any number of relevant keywords which will also be added during import.
After the import is complete, it's just a matter of repeating the process for each separate shoot. That's where things can get a little tricky. You may have have hundreds of images to select and quite often finding where one shoot finishes and the next one starts can be a little difficult. Yes, if you have 'Don't import suspected duplicates' ticked in the import dialogue then those images should be greyed out so finding the first image is easy. It's getting to that last one that can be time consuming.
So, here is the tip. During the course of the day’s photography and after each shoot is complete simply fire off a burst of shots with your lens cap on. Five to ten shots will be plenty. Now when you are scrolling down through all your image thumbnails looking for that elusive last image you'll suddenly be confronted with a block of black exposures. You'll know instantly that that's the end of that shoot. Obviously, ignore the black shots and don't import them. Repeat the process for the next group and so on.
The process of making all those selections will have just gotten a whole lot easier.
