Heading abroad with your camera? If you want to keep your social media followers up to date throughout your photography trip, without overwhelming yourself with admin, I highly recommend you follow the below workflow for processing, editing and sharing your photos.
Don't come home to a huge pile of unsorted photos from your trip. Organize them as you go to save time later. (Trust me, I made this mistake earlier in the year. I came home from Zambia with 40,000 images which, 8 months later, I still haven't sorted).
What I've learned the hard way: hard drives are for back ups and storage. Don't use them as a primary location for sorting and processing photos!
My photography workflow for travel...
TDLR:
Rate photos in camera
Download rated images to phone via app like CameraConnect
Sort into albums on camera gallery
Edit via Lightroom Mobile app
Export back to phone into ‘edited’ folder in camera gallery
Upload to Instagram.
Back up SD cards to hard drive(s) via laptop.
Back up phone images via Lightroom auto-sync to cloud, and directly to Google Photos. (I also back up my hard drives to IDrive).
...In bullet points
Every day:
Take photos on a camera with bluetooth / wifi connection. I use a Canon R6 Mark 2.
N.B. I always shoot in 'RAW' rather than JPEG, because I prefer to have more control and better options when it comes to editing my images. If you are light on editing, or only really want to use your photos for social media, you could shoot in JPEG.
After each sighting, 'rate' best photos within the camera using star feature.
Once every few days:
Take advantage of rest stops where wifi or mobile data is available. Transfer rated photos from camera to app (I use CameraConnect). These automatically download to my phone's camera gallery.
On my phone camera gallery, add newly downloaded images into an album. I keep these simple; i.e. one per country visited.
Once a week-ish:
Edit images via photo editing app (I use Adobe Lightroom because I already have a paid subscription for Desktop).
Download final images to phone, add to 'edited' album.
Upload or schedule to Instagram!
Once every couple of weeks or when my SD cards are getting full (N.B. I really should have done this more often but, well, laziness):
Connect hard drive to laptop
Create a consistent and organised folder structure on hard drive. This doesn't need to be complicated. Mine was simply: Country (e.g. Namibia) > Day 1 (Date, brief summary of key sightings) > RAW files.
Back up images into respective folders, using capture date as reference.
Pros of this workflow
Despite the numerous steps, this process is quick and efficient once you're used to it. To simplify further, skip the photo editing app (e.g., Adobe Lightroom). Transfer photos from camera to phone, save to camera roll, and share on Instagram!
Having back ups of your photos on your phone, rather than on just a hard drive, is extra secure. A caveat is that I became less efficient at backing up my SD cards straight to my hard drive. Therefore, if something happened to both my SD card and my phone, I could have lost data. Luckily I have Lightroom Mobile syncing all my edits to the cloud AND I also back up all of my phone photos to Google Photos - a step I highly recommend.
You get to know your photos and videos really well. Remember that trip I mentioned from 8 months ago? Only 4 or 5 standout images come to mind. Whereas with this new workflow, I remember (and have quick access to) hundreds of standout moments because I got into the habit of reviewing and sorting them straight away. This helps me plan my Instagram grid better and I'm generally happier knowing everything I managed to capture.
Cons of this workflow
The main drawback of this workflow is the need to re-edit images if I want to use them for more than social media or my website. For example, entering competitions. That's because Camera Connect converts RAW files to JPEG when I download them onto my phone, reducing quality and editing options. To avoid this issue, import camera images directly into Lightroom Mobile to edit RAW files, back up to the Cloud, and access higher quality images from your laptop.
(I didn't mind because I would always re-edit my photos before entering them into competitions, anyway. And I was already mid-way into my recent trip before thinking about optimising the workflow). Of course I could have just edited photos from my laptop via hard drive and Lightroom Classic, but when you're on the go it's much easier to do everything from your phone.
In conclusion...
This process worked very well for me, and I'm happy to say I don't have another 40,000 images lurking on a hard drive. Are there things I could tweak in the future? Definitely. But as someone who is chronically disorganised I'm just thrilled I managed to capture so many amazing moments and stay on top of sharing them...semi-regularly...
Do you have a preferred workflow? And if so does it look anything like this?
Comment below!
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