Adobe Lightroom Workflow – Part 2 – Flag, Rate, and Filter

In the previous article of this series we took an in-depth look at importing your photos into Lightroom. Now that your photos are imported, let’s take a few moments to go through them and tag them with a flag, rating or color so we can easily filter through them during the editing process.

It’s sometimes easy to underestimate the importance of a good tag and filtering process. If done right this can be a huge time saver. It’s also handy for archiving; when you return to these photos after weeks, months or years have passed you are immediately able to see the original tags you applied.

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Adobe Lightroom Workflow – Importing Photos

What? You’re not using Adobe Lightroom? Well, you should be. Lightroom is a very powerful image editor and management system, and since it was created by Adobe then it integrates great with Photoshop. It has quickly become a vital program in my photography workflow and one of the easiest programs to recommend to friends who are looking for a better way to manage and edit photos.

The starting point of any workflow is the importing of the files. (Yes, I know the actual starting point is the creation of the photos, but for the sake of staying within the scope of this article, let’s agree that our starting point begins with the import). This is the foundation of your workflow, getting your photos imported to relevant locations on your hard drive and named accordingly.

This article details the steps I take when importing files in Lightroom. There are no definitive right ways to import your files, so I am by no means preaching the gospel here. I’m just offering suggestions on what has helped me over the past few years in organizing my photos for effective use and archiving. Read more