Discussion:
[KPhotoAlbum] Streamlining my workflow
Robert Krawitz
2015-01-12 04:00:34 UTC
Permalink
I'd like to find a way to streamline my workflow (and see if anyone
else has a similar situation, which I'd think is quite common).

I photograph a lot of basketball and (American) football games for the
school I went to years ago. I also shoot the occasional wedding. I
typically wind up with 1500-2000 frames per game. A couple of times
I've had multiple events in one day and wind up with closer to 4000
frames. So everything I can do to streamline the experience is
welcome.

My usual workflow is as follows:

1) Download photos.

2) Read them into kpa.

3) Do an initial scan to knock out everything that's not potentially
usable (out of focus, lighting bad, view blocked, whatever). This
is usually 20-25% of everything.

4) Do a second scan to find the images that I do want to use. For
games, this is typically 250-500 frames (more for football, fewer
for basketball). For weddings, this will usually be just about
everything that's left.

5) Copy them out of kpa.

6) Post-process (crop if need be, shrink image size if they're going
on the web).

7) Upload to my web site or copy to a flash drive for distribution.

How I

1) Download photos. I have a script I've written to extract the shots
from the memory card(s) and stick them in the appropriate
directories. This can take a little while, but only in the sense
that 10 GB of data doesn't transfer instantaneously, and there's
probably very little I can do to optimize this.

2) Fire up kpa, let it read in the new images and build thumbnails for
them. This again is time consuming. It takes longer than
downloading the photos. It takes longer because kpa has to read in
the "bad" shots as well as the good ones, but I don't see an
obvious way around that.

At this point, I also apply a keyword (key phrase, really) for the
event I'm cataloguing.

3) This step is tedious. I do it by tokening each bad shot with "K"
and afterwards deleting everything with that tag. This
unfortunately means that for the shots I eliminate I have to use
key strokes -- K and space -- which slows things down a bit. I've
been thinking I'd like a way to apply a token and move on in one
keystroke, but it occurred to me that I could simply hit the delete
key in the viewer, which removes the image from the current image
set. At the end, I could apply a token to all of the remaining
images, and then select images with the keyword that don't have the
token as the ones I want to get rid of.

4) This step is also tedious; I do it the same way.

5) The new-ish right click to copy images is very useful here.
Everything else is done outside of kpa.

I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on this...
--
Robert Krawitz <***@alum.mit.edu>

*** MIT Engineers Football -- Historic 10-1 2014 NEFC Champions ***
MIT VI-3 1987 - Congrats MIT Engineers 6 straight men's hoops tourney
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
Risto H. Kurppa
2015-01-12 06:36:46 UTC
Permalink
Hi,

I usually do step 2 ie. removing the obviously unusable ones before reading
the files into KPA & generating thumbs. I ususally use Gwenview for this.

Robert, how about making steps 2 and 3 (ie. reading files into KPA and
deleting the bad ones) in parallel?
After copying, start KPA to find new files and generate thumbs and at the
same time use Gwenview to already start going through the bad ones?
Then in the end in KPA select 'view files not on disk' and remove those
from KPA?

Just an idea.


Risto
Post by Robert Krawitz
I'd like to find a way to streamline my workflow (and see if anyone
else has a similar situation, which I'd think is quite common).
I photograph a lot of basketball and (American) football games for the
school I went to years ago. I also shoot the occasional wedding. I
typically wind up with 1500-2000 frames per game. A couple of times
I've had multiple events in one day and wind up with closer to 4000
frames. So everything I can do to streamline the experience is
welcome.
1) Download photos.
2) Read them into kpa.
3) Do an initial scan to knock out everything that's not potentially
usable (out of focus, lighting bad, view blocked, whatever). This
is usually 20-25% of everything.
4) Do a second scan to find the images that I do want to use. For
games, this is typically 250-500 frames (more for football, fewer
for basketball). For weddings, this will usually be just about
everything that's left.
5) Copy them out of kpa.
6) Post-process (crop if need be, shrink image size if they're going
on the web).
7) Upload to my web site or copy to a flash drive for distribution.
How I
1) Download photos. I have a script I've written to extract the shots
from the memory card(s) and stick them in the appropriate
directories. This can take a little while, but only in the sense
that 10 GB of data doesn't transfer instantaneously, and there's
probably very little I can do to optimize this.
2) Fire up kpa, let it read in the new images and build thumbnails for
them. This again is time consuming. It takes longer than
downloading the photos. It takes longer because kpa has to read in
the "bad" shots as well as the good ones, but I don't see an
obvious way around that.
At this point, I also apply a keyword (key phrase, really) for the
event I'm cataloguing.
3) This step is tedious. I do it by tokening each bad shot with "K"
and afterwards deleting everything with that tag. This
unfortunately means that for the shots I eliminate I have to use
key strokes -- K and space -- which slows things down a bit. I've
been thinking I'd like a way to apply a token and move on in one
keystroke, but it occurred to me that I could simply hit the delete
key in the viewer, which removes the image from the current image
set. At the end, I could apply a token to all of the remaining
images, and then select images with the keyword that don't have the
token as the ones I want to get rid of.
4) This step is also tedious; I do it the same way.
5) The new-ish right click to copy images is very useful here.
Everything else is done outside of kpa.
I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on this...
--
*** MIT Engineers Football -- Historic 10-1 2014 NEFC Champions ***
MIT VI-3 1987 - Congrats MIT Engineers 6 straight men's hoops tourney
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net
"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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--
| risto h. kurppa
| risto at kurppa dot fi
| http://risto.kurppa.fi
Tobias Leupold
2015-01-12 11:06:12 UTC
Permalink
Post by Risto H. Kurppa
I usually do step 2 ie. removing the obviously unusable ones before reading
the files into KPA & generating thumbs. I ususally use Gwenview for this.
That's the very way I also do it. I first copy my photos to some temporary
location and look at each photo using Gwenview. Then I simply delete the
photos I don't want (using the del key). Gwenview is simply much more
convenient to use for this task.

After having rotated (if necessary) and selected the images, I run a script (
http://nasauber.de/opensource/scripts/#date_rename ) against the tmp directory
that renames all images like Number_YYYY-MM-DD_HH-mm and the directory like
[from date]-[to date]--Name.

At this point, I do have the data I really want and then, I move the dir to my
album and let KPA add it.

I think that KPA is not a good tool to select or sort photos, and it's also
not intended to be one (imo). Using Gwenview for this is surely the easier
way.

Cheers,
Tobias
Robert Krawitz
2015-01-12 12:51:32 UTC
Permalink
Post by Risto H. Kurppa
Hi,
I usually do step 2 ie. removing the obviously unusable ones before reading
the files into KPA & generating thumbs. I ususally use Gwenview for this.
Robert, how about making steps 2 and 3 (ie. reading files into KPA and
deleting the bad ones) in parallel?
After copying, start KPA to find new files and generate thumbs and at the
same time use Gwenview to already start going through the bad ones?
Then in the end in KPA select 'view files not on disk' and remove those
from KPA?
Just an idea.
Interesting thought.
--
Robert Krawitz <***@alum.mit.edu>

*** MIT Engineers Football -- Historic 10-1 2014 NEFC Champions ***
MIT VI-3 1987 - Congrats MIT Engineers 6 straight men's hoops tourney
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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