#cataloguing software

How to organise your image catalog: some ideas

Image organisation is important. If you can’t find your best work in the future, it’s effectively been lost.

Just to be clear, this is simply a set of ideas, not a set of instructions. We all think and work differently, but it’s possible you think and work like me and that you might find these ideas useful.

There is a lot of factual information here about image cataloguing software and its…

How to cull images part 2: The triple-D – Duplicates, Duds and the just plain Dull. If you are anything like me and you don’t cull your images, you risk drowning in a sea of duplicates, RAW+JPEG pairs, half-finished experiments and dross.

If you are anything like me and you don’t cull your images, you risk drowning in a sea of duplicates, RAW+JPEG pairs, half-finished experiments, virtual copies and images that were probably not worth shooting but you never got rid of.

It’s only when you get rid of all the images that AREN’T contributing anything that you can really start to work on those that ARE.

The trouble was, I…

How to cull images part 1: Culling anxiety, and how to get around it! I always found it impossible to delete any photo, ever, until I figured out this really obvious solution.

I went on a trip to Japan. I’ve never been before and I knew I might not go again, so I took a lot of pictures. I shot RAWs and JPEGs, I shot some things in burst mode and I shot a lot of things twice, or three times, or four times, from as many different angles as I could think of. I took a lot of shots.

And then I came back and I edited my images in this application and that application,…

Could Capture One be the new Aperture? Like Aperture, it can create fully managed catalogs, which means all your images are stored within a single, monolithic catalog file. It sounds like madness... but is it?

It’s possible I may never get over the loss of Aperture, Apple’s abandoned image cataloguing and editing software. It eventually lost out to Lightroom’s more advanced editing tools, but Lightroom has never come close (nor any other program) to Aperture’s speed or its organisational genius. Aperture’s handling of stacks and picks and albums and projects was just perfect. Sigh.

But there is a…

Traditional photo editing is ‘destructive’. Every adjustment you make permanently changes the pixels in the photo. 'Non-destructive’ editing is fully reversible and you can go back at any time to make changes. But there's a catch.

Photo by Domenico Loia on Unsplash

Traditional photo editing is ‘destructive’. That means every adjustment you make permanently changes the pixels in the photo and there’s no way back unless you’ve saved a copy of the original and you’re willing to start again.

‘Non-destructive’ editing is fully reversible. You can go back and undo or redo all of your editing work at any point in the…

Luminar 4 cheat sheet: How to find your way around the Luminar 4 Library window. This annotated screenshot shows the main controls and options – there's quite a lot to take in and some features are more important than others.

The Luminar 4 Library window is where you do all of your image opening, importing and organizing. You select the Library view using the first of three buttons (6) at the top of the tools panel on the right. The second button (7) is for the Edit view. The third Info view (8) simply displays the camera’s EXIF (shooting) information.

The Library view actually has two modes. This is the Gallery