Sadly Iggy can’t really help me. But there are a number of ways of improving my workflow that really will save time. I’ve mentioned before that I use Lightroom to process my images, which already saves me loads of time. About 95% of my adjustments (white balance, the odd crop here and there) are done from Lightroom. Photoshop is there if needed, but I only tend to fire this up for serious image resizing or complex edits. Photoshop is for the designer; Lightroom is for the photographer.

I’ve installed a new plugin this week which lets you export your files directly from Lightroom to Flickr. It’s a brilliant piece of work by Jeffrey Friedl. Working as part of the export process, it uses the Flickr API to automatically upload your pictures using the keywords as tags. Metadata can be expanded or restricted as well. Download the Lightroom Flickr plugin from Jeffrey’s blog and see what I mean! It will even tweet out when you’ve added the pictures if you want.

I’m a bit of a latecomer to Flickr (well, properly anyway). I’ve dabbled for ages, but in the past I used Picassa to upload pictures. Now I’ve put some of my favourite images up on Flickr – feel free to take a look – You can find my Flickr feed here. I’ll rename the images and tag them properly, honest.

In going through my pictures to choose a few for Flickr it’s amazing how self critical you get – images I rated as a four only a month ago I downgraded to a two. As Henri Cartier-Bresson said,

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”

So my workflow is refined, I can now capture, rate, keyword, edit and output my pictures online at speed. As soon as I take some decent shots I’ll be there…