I'm getting faster but not nearly fast enough. Yesterday's first 400 (India) took 280 minutes, the next 400 (Czech) took 175 minutes.
My workflow is four passes:
Pass 1: Rate the images 1-5, flag the ones to upload, mark the ones that are not appropriate for the photo-pairing project, mark the ones that need retouching (and are being uploaded).
Pass 2: Retouch the images that need it.
Pass 3: Add tags (and there's a long list of them) to images that are being uploaded. The tag data is what's being used to find candidate matches across the world, so each photo ends up with 5-10 tags
Pass 4: Add titles and captions and location.
I continue to be stunned by Adobe Lightroom. There are so many methods for refining a photo, and they make a very versatile toolbox as a group. I can brighten up a face to make it pop, de-emphasize some distracting object on the side, fix the lens vignetting issue that my relatively cheap camera has at wide angles... I have to focus these efforts on the best photos though, or I'll sink in way too much time.
Working on photos gets me into a flow state that's reminiscent of coding, though it's a much more emotional state as I'm going through powerful memories from my trip. It gets draining after a while though. If I had to do this with a bunch of strangers' wedding photos, I'd drive myself insane in under a week.
Now I really miss India. Seeing the photos again brought back a lot of the intensity of my few days there.
Road to Ajanta:
Indian Photoshop...
Fake Taj Mahal
Ellora caves
