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Thanks to tools like Aperture and Lightroom, what happens to photos after they come off the flash card is now much more predictable than in the past. Whereas it used to be that just about everyone had a different way of organizing their digital negatives, choosing formats, keeping track of originals and edits, and doing all the other things that need to be done to get a final product out the door, these types of applications have adopted a convention-over-configuration attitude. Even though lots of little choices are being made by the software, in general they’re making them in a transparent way, and still leaving some of the specifics up to the user.

It’s not to say that as soon as you choose Lightroom instead of Aperture you’re stuck with one workflow for the rest of your life. There’s plenty of flexibility built in so you can do things one way for the weddings you shoot, and a completely different way for managing your family Christmas snapshots. The niceties that you don’t have control over are the things like catalog metadata management and handling multiple versions of a single photo; things you probably don’t want to be dealing with anyway.

I’m going to go over just one workflow, that I commonly use for dealing with sports photography, but it is basically destination agnostic and could probably work well for any workflow that starts with a large volume of images coming in at one time. I will talk a bit about how I manage my files on the hard drive, the ways I use various features of Lightroom, and some of the custom conventions I have decided on that help me get things done.

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