Update

Green Heron with Its Crest up and Scratching Its Face

Well, I have not been out photographing the natural world around us because I have been working and finally have finished upgrading my catalog keywords. This has made keywords easier to find and has them in a more logical hierarchical system. While I was doing this I found misspelled words that created duplicate but wrong keywords, which I have corrected now. I had decided that I had to finish this project otherwise I probably never would have gotten that finished.

My next project is to go through my pictures without keywords. Most of these are from my earlier years in digital photography where I kept every picture that I took. So as I go through and keyword pictures I am also deleting pictures that are out of focus or look to me as having no intrinsic value or even with post-processing can be salvaged.

All these photos I rejected

As I find some pictures that I really like I will take a break and process them.

White-faced Capuchin - Cebus capucinus;

Red-legged honeycreeper with bees flying around it

Tonight it's post be warm and raining and I am going to go out and look to see if the frogs and salamanders are traveling to the vernal pools so I can take some pictures. The only problem that I foresee is that these creatures may have a sense of what the weather is going to do since there is an episode of freezing rain and then snow coming in in the early morning hours.

Do not forget about the Spring Equinox Workshop through Allens Pond Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary on Saturday, March 22 starting at 6:15 AM daylight savings time. Sunrise is at 6:47 AM. We will meet at the parking lot on Gooseberry Neck in Westport Massachusetts. You can register at http://www.massaudubon.org/get-outdoors/program-catalog#program:sanctuary=25:program_code=33214  cost is $20 for members of Massachusetts Audubon and $25 for non-members




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Keywording Is Important on Import

In a follow-up to the blog on creating hierarchical sets in keywords in Lightroom to make it easier to add keywords to a set of photographs, I noticed that a number of photographs were not showing up for a number of my locations. I ended up searching in the smart catalog for those pictures that did not have any keywords. I found that approximately 1/3 of all my pictures did not have keywords. There were variable reasons why this happened. First when I got a new computer and then created a new catalog I had not check the box to automatically write XMP data into the picture. Therefore I lost a great number of keywords. Secondly early in my career, I did not keyword every picture, which I do now. Also I kept every picture even though it was out of focus all was not worthwhile keeping. Now I have also the pleasure of going through all those pictures, keywording and deleting the out of focus or bad pictures. It would have been easy to do it originally, but now I have something to keep me busy in my spare time.

I just went through all of the pictures without keywords and found a good number that were already starred. Oh well, in my spare time a lot more to do.

The interesting thing that just happened is that Tim Grey in his latest issue of Pixology talked about going back and fixing metadata in old pictures. I thought that great minds work in the same direction and wrote him an email saying that.

My advice if you are using Lightroom or whatever database you utilize is to keyword all of the pictures during or right after you import them. This way you can find whatever photo you need.

Doing this proactively is better than going back and spending an enormous amount the time doing what you should of done in the first place.