Can someone help comment on my workflow?

Question

I’m looking for advice on my workflow.   I'm a dad taking pics of nature, kids, parties etc.    I need to get the gazillion of raw pics off my drive before it overflows.
Also, I’ve been using one collection per year but realize I need to combine all years into one collection… thereby nessesitating external hard drive storage of the actual pics.
Here is what I have come up with….
Phase 1: Download (copy to: C:/Pictures/Downloaded/2010)
Phase 2: Label all pics.   Rate them.
              0 = not yet rated
              1= Archive JPEG low res (Quality=62)
              2= Archive JPEG med res (Quality=85)
              3= Cool. Archive JPEG high (Quality=100)
              4= Very nice. Keep RAW.            
              5= Show my friends J. Keep RAW
Phase 2A: Make sure to delete as many pics as possible !!!!!!! I don’t need 23 pics of my boy making faces.
Phase 3:Delete all picts marked as so.
Phase 4: Export to external drive as a function of star rating. (ex: NAS:/Archive/2010/5star)
-          Export 1,2&3 stars as JPEG.
-          Move 4 & 5 stars as RAW.
Phase 5: Delete all 1,2&3 stars from local hard drive (since they are now in JPEG on external drive)
This process looks good to me but for some reason I am hesitant to execute (fear of loosing pics).  I’d love feedback.
Thanks,
-Ed

Answer 1

If you are worried about losing that "one" photo, start by backing up everything you have now, if you do not already have a backup in place.
After that I would delete as the first step.  Deleting photos is a difficult and emotional process.  You might consider turning it on its head, and instead, go through you images, picking only those you want to keep.  When you come across 23 funny face pictures, pick one!  I suggest you use the pick flag rather than the stars at this stage.  If you use the stars, you will dither over images and whether to keep 4/5 or 3/4/5...  I did this last winter, and went through 1000 images per evening.  After that I found I was losing enthusiasm and judgement.
BTW, the method I used was to build several smart collections, based on a folder structure of Decade/Year/Month/Day.  I wanted to work on one year at a time to keep the number of thumbs under 20,000 at a time:
X to evaluate:
Keywords doesn't contain "XXX"
Folder contains 2004
X to delete:
Keywords contains "XXX"
Folder contains 2004
Pick flag is not flagged
This is how it works.  Pick the "X to evaluate" smart collection.  This will show you all your 2004 images (or whatever folder structure you are using).  Assigning the keywork "XXX" means you have evaluated the image.  Setting the pick flag to "picked" means you want to keep the image.  Go though the thumbs, picking as you go.  When you have finished a group, set the keyword "XXX" for all the thumbs in the group.  They will magically disappear from the "X to evaluate" smart collection, and you can continue with the next group.  However, the images have not been deleted yet.
The next step is to look at the "X to delete" smart collection.  You can quickly review the images, to make sure you have not missed a keeper.  Set the pick flag to pick for any keepers you accidently missed.  Now you can delete the remaining images in the smart collection.
Continue this process with each major folder group.
Also, I suggest you start with your earliest images and work forward.  By doing this, you will quickly see which images are most important to you in the long term.  If you are like me, images of family and friends, and locations that evoke memories turn out to be the most important.  The "works of art" tend to lose their luster over time.  I wanted to keep some so I could see my artistic and technical progress, but not too many.  This has helped me immensly in making decisions on the more recent images, where the artistic merit is closer to my heart.
The next step is to remember the pain involved in cleaning up photo collections, and be ruthless in culling your current shoots to stay on top of the process.  Apart from making it easier to manage your photos, the ones you keep will be more meaningful, as they are less diluted by sheer numbers.
This will make your subsequent steps easier, as you will be working with less images.  You should keep the raw file for every image.  Also, unless you have many hundreds of thousands of images after the culling process, I suggest you keep everything on one drive in one catalog (I assume that is what you meant by "collections").  It will make your image management much easier for tracking and backups.  You can get alot of images on a 2TB drive.
Now that you only have the "keepers" I think you will find a rating system more meaningful if you choose to implement one.
Hope this helps.
Regards
Rory