Digital journal for photographers?

[robgendreau]

This is flummoxing me. When I took photography classes back in the day we were required to keep a photo journal. Obviously before embedded exif metadata keeping track of exposure, etc was only possible that way. We also had systems for writing on slide sleeves, proofsheets, etc. And it was more than exif data; it was stuff like time of day, location, direction, what the client wanted in terms of results, releases, suggestions for editing, and of course information we'd use as text if the photos were being used in say a newspaper article (if we weren't doing photos alone).

What frustrates me is that although Lightroom or Aperture can do amazing things, they don't seem to account for a workflow that allows whatever text you have in digital form to be linked to or otherwise integrated into the photos. I can, in essence, capture lots of metadata into photos even if my camera doesn't generate it (like using my iPhone at the same time to document angles, locations, etc since it then imports with the other photos and be copied over). But what if you were say doing an article about a trip, and also doing the photos? I'd like to open something, even if in another application, and be able to have it link to the photos I shot for that article. I use DayOne, which is a nice journaling application for iOS, but it's not ideal. And I can use something like Evernote for a few notes, but it gets cumbersome as well.

People must take photos of inventories or otherwise need more extensive documentation of what they're photographing; how does one get an efficient workflow going? If it matters, I'm using mostly an iPhone or iPad, LR on a Mac. But I have access to other equipment.

Maybe this is only a problem because of the ease of taking bazillions of photos digitally, but I'm starting to find stuff when I get home I don't even recognize :Wow1:

Rob

 

[nickburt]

I use Lightroom - set up libraries for each trip, then subdivide using keywords, flags, colours, metadata etc.. etc... very versatile.

Must admit, never thought of linking to keywords from external sources, must be possible though, LR can do just about anything.

Off to have a mess about and see what I can do. Must be a way of doing it using keywords.

 

[robgendreau]

It's a bit more than keywords. There's a plugin (Cole?) that allows writing a whole bunch and attaching it to folders or catalogs. But then it exists just there. Sorta useful though.

I've used Mavericks keywords on photos, which is very similar to tags in Windows, but LR doesn't deal with those very well. Seems most image management applications stick to photo metadata. I have some good search tools that can find say "zyzzyx" in both Word documents, jpgs, etc if in either IPTC or Mavericks tags, but it takes some steps, and I'm still dealing with another external application. If I could fool LR into showing text files or even dealing with them as sidecars (as opposed to XML) maybe that would work.

The application Leap actually works the closest to what I want, but of course it can do any photo manipulation.

And when I was making stuff that required Adobe In Design, I made a lot of use of Bridge would could gather a bunch of different types of files together. Works well, just like I want. Ditto Bridge with Photoshop. But then I started using LR in lieu of PS as I used RAW more, and now I use it much more than PS for processing photos. But it seems like Bridge and LR are almost mutually exclusive, although they can share keywords and such. Maybe there's a way to use Bridge this way but I can't even control-click on an image in Bridge to open it in LR. Aargh.