Automating Workflow

The piccy's of our England-football-BBQ took a while to post, partly because of the general air of depression following the result, and partly because of a self-imposed block on downloading pictures from the camera until I'd automated that part of the workflow.

I've always had a strange feeling about software for copying pictures off camera cards, I couldn't work out what the problem was that these applications were solving. But, the more digital photography I do, the more time that get's soaked up in the administration - including what I realised was a significant chunk in copying, archiving, converting and tagging images as they came off the camera.

I've now implemented a automatic process that enables me to stick the flash card in the reader and retire with a cuppa in hand. The workflow I now use does the following:

• scan for source files - for me that's JPG, TIFF, CR2 and DNG
• copy to a target directory on the PC - the workflow creates date-based subdirectories consistent with my archiving structure
• validate the copies - I'm using a MD5 hash to check content
• convert camera RAW files, in my case CR2s, to DNGs - using the Adobe DNG Converter via a command line driven sub process
• validate the converted DNGs - using dng_validate from the Adobe DNG SDK
• wipe clean the source flash card ready for the next day's shooting

I have a few things on the todo list, first up is running a backup session on completion of the workflow, second is looking at improving the process I'm using to tag images with metadata, oh, and giving it a pretty UI...