Managing Photos on a Two Month Trip

The Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone

Ten days into the trip, I had kept 1293 photos and six videos. I don’t know how many photos I’ve actually taken, but I probably end up deleting about 20–30% of them, because I either missed the photo in some way (focus, composition) or it’s essentially a duplicate of another, better photo.

A friend asked for my photo management workflow and I figured I’d try to share it, both to see if it would be helpful to others, but also to show how much room there is for improvement.

First let’s talk briefly about gear. I’m functionally traveling with four cameras: My iPhone 7+, my wife’s iPhone 6s, a Fuji X100F, and a Fuji XT-2. For the XT-2, I am using my holy trinity of primes: A wide angle 16mm, mid-reach 35mm, and portrait 56mm. I have a zoom to cover the longer reaches, handling about 50mm to 200mm. Technically we have four iPads with us, and they all have cameras, but let’s be serious.

I generally carry my phone in my pocket, the X100F on a Peak SlideLite camera strap under my left armpit, and the XT-2 attached to a Peak Capture device on the right strap of my Osprey Escapist 20. The three extra lenses are usually distributed between the two side mesh pockets and the top pocket of the bag. If I can travel light (which is rare, because I pack for the family during the day, carrying the medical kit, sunscreen, bug spray, bear spray, etc.) I slip two lenses into the pockets of my hoodie or whatever and carry my XT-2. The even lighter version is just the X100F, which can either be an egregious mistake or perfect, depending on what I’m trying to shoot.

I also brought a tripod, but have rarely been using it, although I found it useful in capturing sunrise at the Grand Tetons because I could compose the shot perfectly then just keep shooting as the light changed.

Sunrise over the Grand Tetons, from the Jackson Lake Lodge

I’m also traveling with the world’s largest tripod, which sometimes helps me get a different angle on photos. 😁

The family looking for wildlife in the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. We spent most of the time studying a mother coyote and her three cubs.

I almost always prefer to shoot with my XT-2, but the phone and X100F have different focal lengths, and I will choose whichever has the best combination of accessibility and focal length.

I’m traveling with a laptop, but rarely using it. My iPad has a Verizon LTE chip in it (so that, when combined with my AT&T chip in my phone, we have maximum coverage), and that’s mostly what I rely on for connectivity and computing.

At the end of every night, I download the photos from both of my Fujis into my iPad. For each camera in turn, I do the same basic dance:

• Plug the card in using Apple’s Lightning to SD card adapter and download all of the photos into Apple’s Photos app. This is wicked fast on the 10.5" iPad Pro (and my old 12.9"), because of USB 3 or something. Once they’re imported, I delete them all from the card and unplug the adapter. On my XT-2 I’m duplicating all photos to a second card, in case I have a mishap.
• Select all photos in the Last Import album and add all of them to the appropriate album (currently I have one album for the whole trip, but that’s about to fall over given scrolling time).
• Delete photos I shouldn’t keep. I could technically do this later, after photos from all cameras are imported, but if you delete from the Last Import album, it’s two touches to delete, whereas if you do it from a normal album it’s four. Thus, it’s twice as efficient to delete right way. I favorite obviously great photos here, but the main focus is triage.
• Once I have photos from all cameras added to the album, I then sweep the album and favorite any photos I really like. I try to maintain about 10–20% favorites; too many, and it starts to get pointless, but too few and you lose a sense of the trip. Some of that ratio is about being generous with my judgement, and some is about forcing me to try harder when I shoot.
• Once I have everything favorited, I select all of the favorites and add them to a shared album that I’ve published to all of my family and friends, and eventually published publicly. This is one of the stupidest parts of the workflow, in my opinion. Why do I have to do this manually? Why can’t Apple do this automatically? Or why can’t it just take an existing album and make it shared? Inane. I would normally just publish to Flickr, but Apple crippled photo publishing when it switched from iPhoto to Photos.

An osprey catching its lunch. Everything had to come together for this photo: Using a zoom lens, in continuous focus mode, on continuous shooting mode, and I cropped the photo so I needed all the megapixels available. The only way it could have been better is with a polarized filter so the water looked better.

One of the great things about this workflow is I don’t have to think about the online portion at all. Apple will automatically upload the photos when I have connectivity, in both my iCloud Photo Library and in the shared album. This one of the very few services these days that is useful asynchronously; it just spins away in the background, and never bothers exposing to me any connectivity issues. Compare that to the app I’m writing this in, Ulysses — it’s a great writing app, but publishing to Medium is 100% synchronous, requiring a modal dialogue, and when anything at all goes wrong, it throws up its hands and fails in some way or other. Modern apps are just not built for low connectivity situations, and Apple deserves credit for doing so with Photos and iCloud Photo Library.

In terms of downsides, beyond the stupidity of publishing favorites, the other big problem with this workflow is the iPhones. They are problem for a big and small reason. The small reason is that they are often without service, which means I can’t easily manage their photos like I manage the others. I add them to the album each day on the phone, but then it could take a week or more for them to show up in the album on my iPad. The big problem is that there’s no fixed way of ensuring I hit every photo. With my cameras, I know every photo goes through Last Import, so I see each one; with my phones, I just have to scan all of the photos from the last week or two periodically to see if I missed anything, hoping I can tell whether something is new. It’s stupid.

I am in danger of focusing more on the photography than the actual experience. One must live in the moment, for a moment worth capturing must first be worth experiencing. At the same time, great trips are great for different reasons to different people.

The valley around the Payette River, on the way from Boise to Stanley. This is the first time I’ve been playing with black and white (mostly using Fuji’s Acros film simulation), and it’s been great focusing on contrast rather than color.

One of the pulls of photography is that it provides a justification for selfishness, for stopping when others keep walking, for going on walkabout when others are still, and that selfishness is freeing in many ways. It’s tough to be selfish in a family, and it’s nice to have an excuse for it. The risk is doing it to exclusion of enjoying the family and the parks, though. I am experimenting with new constraints to keep it to a minimum, but I also recognize that capturing has become one of my joys, and one of the kinds of mastery I am pursuing.

This is the first trip I’ve taken where I pointedly seek out the golden hour, getting up at 5am multiple times to take photos. I’ve been rewarded handsomely, but wow it’s weird for me to get up early of my own volition. The photo below was the first reward for such an effort, and it easily motivated me to try more.

The Sawtooth Mountains at sunrise

Because I’m also posting some of the best photos to Instagram, I’m also learning what people like there, and the answer is “people”. Great photos are not considered great by that crowd unless there are people involved. Unfortunately Instagram only has an iPhone app, so managing it from my iPad is a total joke. I’ve never seen my pictures look so bad as a zoomed-in iPhone app on an iPad.

That’s about it. It’s hilarious that this post is 3x my normal post length for this trip. It goes to show how much of a gear and process head I am. The trip is fun, but the gear! And the workflows! The systems!