We came home from our four day trip with 3,400 pictures! We also had about 10 minutes of video. There was not really time to work on them while we traveled so they were all waiting for us to get home to be worked on.
Why so many you ask. There are a number of reasons. Since there is no film cost we take a lot of extras to be sure we get just the right lighting, capture something in motion, etc. A bigger problem is that we are not shooting just “Art” pictures. We also have plan for Ecology Study Guides which requires lots of pictures of ecosystem details.
The high resolution of the images also creates a problem; pictures which would have been obvious discards often have high quality areas which are worth keeping. For example, we took some pictures out of the window of a m0ving car. There is a blurred area along the bottom but the top my actually be good. The need to look for that and do the crop slows down the discard process.
Another problem area has to do with keeping track of all the pictures, making sure they are backed up, and keeping track of edits. There is ample space on the notebook/external hard drive for all of this. The issue is keeping track of which pictures have been worked on. There isn’t much reason for both of us to got through all the pictures and discard the same ones. There is also no need for both of us to edit the same picture.
Finally, I discovered Picasa is not really robust enough to cope with everything I need to do. (But that’s for another post.)
Our marketing strategy involves posting pictures for sale on lots (100+) small niche websites. That means I may only need 25 or 30 of the pictures for any one site. It would seem like the efficient way would be to go through all the pictures once, discard as many as possible, and keyword the rest for easy assignment to a website. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
For one thing, I can’t remember all the sites I might want to put pictures. I may want to put the same picture in more than one place. For example, a picture of a Saguaro cactus might go on PicturesOfCactus.com or a Sonoran desert page.
Doing the complete process for each photo moves so slowly it would be weeks before I was actually ready to publish pictures to websites. That would probably go fast, but I can’t stand waiting all that time to start publishing them. I KNOW it’s better to get some published and then add more as time permits. This gives the search engines time to find the site and start indexing them. Then it provides new content when they revisit the sites. Gradual publication with incremental new content will lead to better rankings than loading a huge site all at once and then letting it sit.
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