10framesasecond: My workflow

With a couple CF cards full of U9 soccer pics, I set off on my first attempt at creating a workflow to get images from camera to my exposuremanager site in the shortest time possible.

1. Calibrate Monitor - even though I have my exposure manager site set up for display only, which allows me to make final touches to each picture as it is ordered, I thought now is as good a time as any to get into a habit of routine calibration.
   
2. Import images from CF with Lightroom - ever since Lightroom's official release of 1.1 I've given up on the windows move command for transfering files - Lightroom's file renaming and Metadata templates really make it a one step process. 605 images imported.
3. Cull images - Once one card is transferred and the the second one is being imported, I start going through and using the 'reject' flag to tag all the out of focus shots and 'missed' shots. I do this in the Loupe mode with as big an image as possible. I also will take this opportunity to identify any 'must post' shots with a 5 star rating. Once done I just have Lightroom delete all rejects. 211 images deleted.
4. Identify shots to post for sale - So now that the bad ones are out I start back at the beginning and use the 'B' keyboard shortcut to send images to the 'quick collection' as a temporary place to store the pictures before tagging them and exporting them to Exposure Manager. Just how many should be posted? I struggled with this one a bit - I've heard interviews with photog's that claim they post everything because there always surprised at what images people buy. But when I look at a gallery with 500 pictures, I just can't believe anyone would have the patiences to browse through that many pics. So I went with just what I thought were my best shots. 97 images collected.
5. Tagging - Right now I'm tagging pictures to Identify: which team has the ball (I'll use this tag to create sub galleries in Exposure Manager), the jersey numbers of the prominent players in the picture (this will be used for the search function in Exposure Manager ), and a 'posted' tag so I can later track what's been posted and what's been sold.
6. Setup Collections - Right now I'm making a collection set that will mirror the gallery structure in Exposure Manager. Not sure if this is useful or if it will stay in my workflow but I'm doing it for now.
   
7. Export Images - select all pictures in a team collection and export them to a Temporary folder and name it with the team name. I do this for both teams. Once again the templates in Lightroom really make this a easy to setup once and forget.
   
8. Upload using FTP - I have my Exposure manager FTP site setup as network drive on my Windows machine so it just a matter of dragging and dropping the exported folders over between my local drive and the FTP site. I haven't tried exporting directly to the FTP site with Lightroom maybe I try this next week.
   
9. Assign Gallery - once the files on on the Exposure Manager site, its just a matter of logging on to the account and telling what Gallery to assign the FTP files to. You must also tell Exposure Manager to create sub galleries from each folder.
   

Total time: 4 hours (with a couple breaks to lay down some licks on Guitar HeroII). Ouch! need to refine this much further....

Things to try next time - Although I hate to add to the workflow, the 500 pixel images are just too small to see any detail so I'm gonna have to start cropping the picutre to maximize the impact of each image. But we'll see how this impacts sales.