Until recently my digital photography ‘workflow’ (such as it was) has been comically under-thought:
- Take photo, download images (using canon software) to mac and wipe CF card.
- Import images into iPhoto 6 then:
- Battle against iPhoto’s terrible data-entry interface (helped slightly by Ken Ferry’s great Keyword assistant for iPhoto).
- Complain bitterly when I realized that iPhoto does not write EXIF/XMP, instead it keeps metadata in own proprietary database.
- Lament iPhoto’s ignorance of Geo-tagging (storing latitude and longitude in photos to allow them to be represented on maps).
- Avoid backing up iPhoto library (not so straight-forward) whilst panicking that i’d lose my photos to a disc failure.
- Ignore requests to email photos due to effort required (we all do it!) or resize and email if feeling keen (rare).
- Occassionally upload tiny subset to facebook (and receive angry-mails from non-facebookers who can’t see the images).
The New way
- Signed up for flickr pro account. $25/year for unlimited storage/bandwidth etc.
- Downloaded Lightroom (metadata editor, neat tone curve editor).
- Downloaded PictureSync. It turns iPhoto data into EXIF/IPTC/XMP/Spotlight tags, pulls lat/long from google earth (optional) and uploads (full-size) photos flickr. Also plays nice with lightroom. Great rules engine (for fixing metadata).

- Added My Flickr app to my facebook profile, canned default photo app.
The new status quo
- Images metadata now embedded in images (where it ought to be) instead of in an app’s database.
- Photos backed up (hurrah) in the cloud (even better) at full resolution/quality with powerful privacy control.
- Can view/search/share entire photo library over web (including all metadata).
- Friends/family can download images (configurable) in a variety of sizes without any additional effort on my part.

- Ready-made RSS (and GeoRSS) feeds of my images thanks to flickr (friends and family can subscribe).
- My Geo-tagged photos can be viewed on ready-made map UI. Cool!
- Significantly more web 2.0 street-cred (easy on the 2.0 cynicism people!)
So next time someone asks me to send them a copy of a photo, there’s now a more-than-slim chance I may actually do so.
Next on my list is getting my G7 and my new GPS working together to automatically geocode my images.