Digital Photography: Unsolved Problem

My adventure with digital photography started in 2002 when I realized the quality of images taken with my Minolta Dimage F100 beat an analog film. Since then I have been paying a lot of attention to ordering my catalogs, backing them up and preparing them for sharing as well as being able to display on variety of devices.

As a matter of fact this comes down to my Definition-of-Done. Done is not when I press the shutter button. Done is when the photo is cataloged, geo-tagged, post-processed, stored in an ordered album, ranked and shared on line. Today, 13 years later, this process remains extremely painful and difficult.

There seems to be only one photo post-processing app that stands out. The Adobe Lightroom. It is difficult to learn but after you master even the basics, everything else pales in comparison. There is also a huge ecosystem of Lightroom plugins that are not available otherwise. Some of them, like the Google Nik Dfine 2 are worth every cent ad then some.

Unfortunately the Lightroom, despite being named Lightroom Creative Cloud has very oldschool architecture. It is an executable program you install on Windows or Mac and it operates on a database on your local hard drive. Only the licensing part is Cloud - like: you pay a monthly license.

The workflow - in my case - is still very labor intensive. Here is how it goes:

1. Offload RAW photos from the cameras. Yes there is usually more than one camera involved. Even in the simplest cases I happen to snap some photos with my phone, along with my DSLR. More exotic vacation trips with friends make me deal with 4-6 photo sets.
2. Merge the photo sets. It should be as easy as dropping all the photos in one folder. But then you end up with a complete mess. What I want is some chronology, so I carefully rename all the files based on the date-time the photos were taken. Lightroom has SOME support for that.
3. Download the track log from a GPS Tracking device. Import the tracklog to Lightroom. Adjust time offsets. Geo-tag the photos (the native geo-tagging feature in LR6 has some bugs, so I'm using a 3rd party plugin for that).
4. Have several runs of rating. This is to go down from like 3000 photos to 600. The rating process cries for being done on-line, so the closest group of interested parties should be able to vote on each photo. Unfortunately this is not possible and has to be done on one computer.
5. Filter out the keeps and have several post-processing sessions on them. It is good to have others having a look at the post-processed photos before they are final. Again no Cloud support for that.
6. Export JPEGs to Picasa for online sharing.
7. Share using Picasa / Google Photos. Ufff...

The digital darkroom seems to be an enormous opportunity. Still open. And growing - thanks to the smartphones being equipped with better and better camera sensors. Adobe has a good post-processing technology, but in terms of being a Cloud company it is still a dinosaur. And the workflow has to be straightened. I watched about 20 hours of instructional videos before I could start my baby steps in Lightroom. It is a huge entry barrier. One that will push more and more people towards dropping the cameras all together and using their phones with auto-backup as the only means to take photos.