I have a photo workflow that’s been pretty stable for the past few years. Images are ingested from cards to Aperture which is the image database. Image processing is mostly done in Photoshop using NIK filters. On saving, the PSD image is saved in Aperture and a copy exported to Flickr with the FlickrExport plugin.
Flickr is great as a place to have images seen and to look at other images. I don’t spend as much time on the social aspects of Flickr as I have in the past, mostly because I’m not as engaged in photography as I am in other activities these days. Even without the social aspect of Contacts and Groups of Flickr, its still the image repository of choice for public display of images, supporting EXIF browsing and searching.
I also love how easy it is to post images to ODB, either directly from Flickr or the media manager in MarsEdit where this post was created. In this workflow, each tool can actually take care of multiple steps, but I tend to take the approach of passing the image and text from app to app based on where I prefer to perforrm each step. I could, for example, ingest and adjust in Aperture, but I like the layer control of Photoshop. Once the image is in Flickr, I can write and post to the blog, but I like the text and preview available with MarsEdit and an external editor.
I’m enjoying the early days with Google+. Uploading iPhone images works well with location tagging and ability to comment, so that’s a great venue for casual photography with the phone, my connected camera where images are spared my tortuous post-processing. I’ve uploaded a few of my processed images directly to Google+, realizing now they’re in Picasa albums at Google. It seems unnecessary to have duplicates there, so it may be best to link to Flickr or this weblog in the case of longer posts like this.
