Hello Bob,

I think we're all about as experienced as each other. Of course, it depends how much of PhD has been explored & tested. Workflow processes will come down to individual preferences & requirements, even in the professional photography community.

My main goal with photo workflow is to be able to locate images efficiently once they're catalogued. I don't have separate projects for each shoot, but that might be appropriate if you were shooting high volume. Personally, I need access to related photos within the same project. For that reason, each project is much like an album/folder reflecting my folder structure in Windows.

e.g. In Windows:
■ Pictures > Photos > Travels > (sub folders) Africa, Australia, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland etc
- within PhD, a similar Album Set > Album structure is followed, except when I'm preparing sets of images for specific purposes. The I simply create a new album.

When importing, I typically import whole folders (pre-organised). I then select all the photos in that folder to create a new album. Albums are then grouped in Album Sets.

Folders & Albums
■ The cataloguing process I follow makes use of PhD's Album Sets, as in the Windows example above:
- Album Set: Travels
->->-> Albums: Africa, Australia, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland etc

There is no correct way to go about it - just what suits your purposes.

I've found no limit to the number of album sets, albums or images that can be included in a single project, nor is there anything about that mentioned in the user guide.

Auto Tone
I hadn't touched the auto tone button since PhD 2011 was released! I've had no such issues with RAW images I'm working with, having just tried a few with the auto-tone feature. It may be dependent on camera model & file type. I'm using RAW files from Canon 5DMKII & 7D(.CR2) & Nikon D90 (.NEF). These display correctly in PhD & respond to auto tone adjustment as expected.

Perhaps you could post a screenshot to illustrate? Uploading a RAW file here would not be efficient (slow server). No - that won't be necessary! I just tested an .ORF file from an Olympus E-3 & I see exactly what you mean!



I'd put in a support ticket - the link is here http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/22361.page#119543

Export Custom Sequence
Bob - you're right. "Invalid Constraint" - I hadn't noticed before as I generally export using the File Name Sequence option. I'll refer this to R&D.

PIX
PIX YouTube channel

PIX, thanks for your detailed reply.

It looks like a single project and multiple albums is the approach to take (with the weekly default backup).

It appears the tags assigned cannot be searched across multiple projects. So, I'll stick with one project, but each of my shooting episodes will be imported and assigned to an album. I'll then be able to search among all the files in the project.

I'm really an enthusiast amateur photographer, and some of my images are for work outside PhotoDirector. Those photos usually wind up as multi-level master files in the proprietary format of PhotoLine or Photoshop Elements and exported from there as JPGs or PNGs. Thus for my purposes I see no reason to elect to bring the exported TIFs or JPGs from PhD3 back into PhotoDirector.

I hope we'll soon be getting more users of PhD3 to post about their experiences here to provide additional feedback to the PhotoDirector engineers.

Bob PhotoDirector 5; Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 3.40 gigahertz Intel Core i7-3770; 16 GB RAM; AMD Radeon HD 7770; Olympus E-M1 & E-M5

Interesting discussion.. as a non-professional photographer, I too am primarily interested in importing and then finding images at a later time. However, some things are quite important to me for "future-proofing" my images for other software down the road. As such, it is critical to me that keywords and other catalog data be made available to the image itself as well as the catalog - and be stored in the XMP block using established standards.

A long time ago, I moved from Thumbsplus (where I did basic IPTC kewording) to Idimager (where I do hierarchical XMP tagging). So many software packages today fail to support hierarchical tagging along with storage in the image XMP block.

My workflow example:
1 - Import images from memory card in Idimager
- auto file rename based on image exif data (camera model). Images stored on C:\photos\<year>-Month\ and copyright info and other minor metadata is added and stored to the database and image during import.

2 - Images are then rated, culled and tagged using hierarchical keywords. All data is stored in both the catalog and the image XMP and IPTC blocks automatically.

3 - Top images are then further tweaked using appropriate 3rd party software (photoshop/lightroom). For RAW files, the use of DNG allows me to re-embed an updated preview within the file so Idimager can display those edits when searching for the images.

The need for albums, folders and such seem to be geared toward folks that do "event" style photos... even then, a simple search using a keyword tag with the event is just as easy as creating these albums, etc..

The ability to search on specific XMP metadata is important as is the ability to create complex searches that can then be setup as "auto-searches" and saved for future use. For example, if I create a search for Flowers->Daisy->Yellow AND Places->Parks->Jobi, and save that search as an Auto Search, then everytime I add an image to the catalog with those 2 keywords, and then click this search, it will quickly show me those items without even having to search the catalog (the searches are kept in memory and updated as the tags are applied). Kinda like Albums... but more flexible.

Anyway - hope this workflow helps!

Nice work PIX. I was able to successfully duplicate this. Thank you.