In the past six months I have clicked over 10,000 frames at weddings, studio sessions, engagements, graduations, and anything you can think of. That’s a ton of photos to manage. This post is by request of several people wanting to know about my workflow when I post process my photos. I have stuck with my free dogma in the world of photography as well. Here are the tools I use to process batches of photos and get them on the web.
I use Google’s Picasa to organize my photos. First of all, it’s free. Secondly, you can easily star photos that you want to pull from the batch later. If I need minor corrections, I will use Google’s simple controls. If they need more intricate corrections, I open them in Photoshop and enhance them there. If you don’t have Photoshop try downloading GIMP, the open source version of Photoshop.
If I’m going to be displaying these photos on the web, I use a Picasa plugin called Simple Viewer. Basically you can export your entire folder of photos into a nice Flash viewer. It creates the the entire gallery for you. All you have to do is upload it to your hosting server and viola! it’s ready to go. Simple Viewer is FREE!!! Check out a gallery a sample gallery here. 
Next comes the question where I store my photos. I am a firm believer in backing up your data. I have multiple external hard drives and flash drives sitting all over the place. However, I do not use a hard drive as my main backup for photos. Documents can be replaced, but the moments captured on photos can never be replaced. For my storage needs, I use Flickr. I will probably lose my FREE groupies here, but hear me out. I spend $2.00/month on a pro account that gives me unlimited storage. I upload all of my originals and keep them private. If I want to share photos, I upload a batch of resized photos. Flickr keeps the files backed up on multiple servers and I know my data is safe. Plus I can access any of my photos anywhere in the world. It’s beautiful. To be safe though, I burn ever batch of photos on a DVD and keep it safely stored in case Flickr ever goes away. With Flickr, you can access your photos from printing sites and a variety of other photo services. You can also pull your photos into galleries on your website. Check out Tilt Viewer (A sister product of Simple Viewer) that allows you to plug in your Flickr user name and pull whatever photos you wish with no headache involved. I could go on and on about Flickr, but I won’t. Try it for yourself! It’s cheap and it’s a blast. For the cheapskates, Flickr offers a free account…but you can only display 200 photos. Now’s a good time to splurge. 
Here’s how I upload batches of photos to my Flickr account. I use a browser called Flock. It’s free and easy to use. It allows you to add descriptions to all of your photos, select which set (folder) you want to upload it to and it takes care of all the rest. It’s super easy. It is my choice uploader because I can set my permissions for the batch before I upload it. Don’t use the official Flickr uploader, it has a bunch of bugs and always locked up on me. For all the Firefox users, you can add a simple plugin to upload photos to your Flickr account. It’s called Fire Uploader. It also allows you to upload to Facebook, You Tube, and a variety of other social networking sites. Fire Uploader is pretty featureless, so don’t expect to set permissions or anything like that. It only allows you to choose which set you want to upload to.
Lastly, if you don’t want to use Flickr, there are some free gallery softwares you can install on your site and host your own photos. I use Gallery for my photography business to let people see their proofs. Also, you can download JAlbum and use it to organize and display your photos. If you would like to take a look at some of my photos, check out my personal blog at: http://brian.fegter.com/my-photography.
