Originally posted by GlennG I'm wondering how you determined what your work flow would be - there seems to be about a million different options to do anything. How did you find "your" way?
Evolution. I started using a webcam and frame-grabber (pulls frames from analog video signals and digitizes them) about 1995, and got an early free-shareware version of PaintShopPro to torture and abuse those images. No SD cards or USB cables -- the devices used parallel (printer) ports, so it was just connect, grab, edit, and save to stiffy discs, later to ZIP-discs.
In 2002 I got my first Sony digicam (1mpx DSC-P20) and a Vaio mini-laptop with a MemStick slot, same as the camera. I wrote a simple script to find and move image files from stick to working drive. At the first rollover of numbered filenames after 9999 shots, I rewrote the script to update naming, so the first 9999 were DSC0xxxx, the next were DSC1xxxx, etc. And I built a simple directory structure so folders were organized by time and place. Logical...
In 2004 we got two 5mpx Sony's. So I modded the script to name those from one DSCAxxxx, the other DSCBxxxx. At each rollover I just increment to the next unused letter. Then came another Sony, fitted into the same DSCnxxxx pattern. Then Minolta and Olympus P&S's, with their own name standards, but I worked those into a similar pattern, also images captured via webcam, scanner, frame-grabber. So I can look at any filename and know which device was the source, and the directory name tells me when, where, what.
In 2008 came the K20D. I'd accumulated more drives by then, had a disastrous failure, and now put pictures only on RAID-1 discs for instaneous backup. Id been using the browsing (XnView), stitching (Canon PhotoStitch, AutoStitch), and editing (PSP9, AnimationShop, Magix Video7) warez for some years, rewritten that script to handle intricacies of directories, etc. So the infrastructure was in place. Now that I shoot only RAW on the K20D, PentaxPhotoLab3 is part of the mix.
So, how did I design my workflow? 15 years of hard work, that's all.