My Digital Photo Workflow Notes

I am currently using a Canon Rebel XTi DSLR camera that records onto Compact Flash media. I'm primarily interested in filing, categorizing and annotating my image files. Post-processing (raw conversion, adjustments, etc.) is usually minimal unless I really messed up my settings or am working commercially.

1. Transfer the images, as taken, to fileserver in a working directory. This is done via USB-connected Compact Flash reader attached to my fileserver (I'm considering adding a built-in card reader if my motherboard provides USB connections internally, need to investigate.) The files are written to a dedicated RAID 1 share on my Fedora Core 6 (currently) Linux fileserver.
2. Set the Compact Flash card aside, just in case...
3. From Unix shell, check that the file ownership and permissions are set correctly on the copied files. File permissions are all changed to 0544 for my purposes, so the files are read-only, but my automated system can access the files.
4. If necessary, renumber (rename) files. Canon stores 10,000 photos per folder, then automatically increments to the next folder. I prefer to append the folder number to the image number to form individual file names like so:
   DCIM/CANON101/IMG_2345.JPG becomes IMG_1012345.JPG. The little shell script I use to rename my files looks like this:

   for i in `ls -1`
         do
         j=`echo $i |sed `s/IMG_/IMG_101/g'`
         mv $i $j
         chmod 0544 $j
      done
   

   I currently keep all my photos in one directory (may rethink this later) so it is important for me to keep filenames unique.
5. Record the filenames of the new files in the work directory, move them to the production directory.
6. Process the photos through raw conversion using Bibble Pro
7. Process the new files (recorded in the previous step) through the script that loads the image records, vital statistics and meta data (EXIF) into the database:
   • sample the image and record the average color in HEX
   • record default values (photographer, photographer e-mail, photographer URL, file directory, filename, url
   • extract EXIF data with jhead and load that data
   • create appropriate .html files which call scripts via SSI and verify new .html file permissions
   • categorize photos where I can by date/time and other extracted information
8. Create test lightbox view of thumbnails
9. Correct any images that need their orientation (rotation) adjusted. Usually this is a rotate operation -90 degrees to counteract the camera being used vertically instead of horizontally.Now done in Bibble Pro, so not an issue.
10. Rebuild thumbnail files for new images. Other than thumbnails, all images are resized on-demand, real-time, and fed as a BLOB from my server to your browser. Neat tricks with Perl, Imagemagick, and Apache.
11. Rebuild category files to account for new files assigned to categories.
12. Verify that everything works correctly and looks sane/sober/kosher.
Format Compact Flash media.

At this point, I've got all the information about the image into the database and appropriate web pages have been built to index and display the photos on my online photo galleries. Now I can sleep restfully. Additional notation, categorization, sorting, filing, etc. is an on-going task (with 20,500+ photos and growing, it may never be finished.) The photo files and databases are backed up on a RAID 1 partition locally (to protect against hardware failure) and are also mirrored remotely (using rsync) so I'll always have a copy off-site (in case of local catastrophe (weather, fire, etc.))

I'm in a constant development process with this project, right now. The to-do list is long. Here are some details of the current implementation.

All photos have appropriate copyright notation and all rights are reserved. All photos are available for licensing. All photos are available in their original, unmodified resolution and format. Please contact me for specific information about licensing.