The work of a photographer goes well beyond snapping pictures—to be successful in your photography business you will need to create workflows that will help you with all the necessary behind-the-scenes tasks. The preparation and post-shooting work that includes organizing photos, editing, and sharing your photos to market yourself all can be time consuming and tedious tasks, so when you are operating your photography business on your own this work load can feel never ending.
Creating workflows is an important tool for you as a photographer to streamline your work and optimize your time. It doesn’t only help you as the photographer, but it makes the process much smoother for your clients.
To help you achieve success, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide to creating and mastering photography workflow. This will help you in every step of the way from preparing for the shoot, the shoot itself, organizing the photos, the selection process, editing and retouching, and finally, getting the finished product out. There’s a lot to go over, so let’s take it slow.
Pre-Shoot Preparation
Your photography work starts long before you make it to the shoot, there are a number of important steps between booking a client in for a photoshoot and taking their pictures—all of those steps fall into the pre-shoot preparation:
Create Standardized Client Preparation Guide
Your main preparation with the client is going to involve planning for the photoshoot. For any photoshoot you do, you should communicate with your client their goals and what their expectations are. This will help you prep for the location, theme, and style, as well as help you understand the creative scope of the project.
It is a good idea to standardize some of the resources you give your clients. For example, developing a one-page document to help a client prepare for their photoshoot can streamline the process of helping them know what to wear, what the day will look like, how they can prepare, etc. This guide for the client can also include parking information or the location of the studio if you are renting or own one.
Planning and Researching Shoot Locations
When you are booking a client in for a 30-minute shoot outside of your studio, you don’t have time to figure out the best places and scenes for the photoshoot—your client will be looking at you for direction. An important part of your pre-shoot checklist should be scoping out the location and developing a plan on how you are going to use the time most effectively. Finding locations that fit each shoot can be time-consuming, but once you’ve become familiar with several options and used a location multiple times, it feels more like an investment in optimizing your workflow.
Preparing Equipment
Organizing your gear and ensuring you have all the equipment you need is another important step in your pre-shoot preparation. Create a checklist for yourself of what you need to pack and prepare the day before your photoshoot and follow it! You may also decide that you want to create one checklist for when you are doing portrait shoots in a studio and another for when you are doing family shoots outside, or any other type of shoot.
Important things on this list can include charging batteries and having extra batteries on hand, lenses, light reflectors, cameras, tripods, SD cards, etc. Make it comprehensive and make it easy for yourself. This routine can save you huge time and energy in thinking “what do I need?” It can also save you the trouble of forgetting something important and only realizing once you arrive at the shoot.
Capturing the Shot
The next part is the fun part—capturing the shot. For this part of the process, you will either be traveling to a location to meet your clients or you’ll be welcoming them to your studio or other space that you are renting.
Making your clients feel comfortable is one of the biggest measures for success for you as a photographer and is what will help you get that perfect shot. Take some time at the beginning to talk to them, make them feel at ease, go over how the shoot will go, and then get started. Test shots should be at the start of every shoot—even if you are in the same location for the day and shooting multiple clients, you will need to start with test shots to ensure that you are utilizing the proper setting for your photos.
Since you have limited time, staying within that time frame is a super important part of your photography workflow. Get in the habit of setting timers—for example, if you are using one backdrop or one outfit before doing a change, set a timer on how much time you want to spend. Did we mention shooting is fun? It’s easy to get carried away and not notice how fast time is moving.
Finally, use a shot list to help guide your pose direction—this is something that you can create for yourself in your pre-shoot preparation and it is something that you can dial in as a photographer and use from shoot to shoot. For example, when you are doing an engagement photoshoot, you can reference all the main poses you want to finish your shoot with. If there was any particular photo or image the client had talked to you about in the planning, make sure that is on your shot list.
And don’t forget to allow yourself to be creative and fun during the process—experiment and try new techniques, there are so many ways to create magic!
Post-Shoot Organization
Once your shooting is done, the real work begins—there is a lot that is left to do in terms of importing images and ensuring that you have a proper backup system. One of the first things you should do once you are back from your photoshoot is upload all your images onto your computer and have the raw image files saved. Your workflow process should include backing them up to a hard drive or the cloud.
Sorting through images is the next stage—it’s time consuming and you may not be able to do it right away depending on your overall workload, but this step will save you more time down the road. Look at this stage of your photo dump being the very first thing you do after the photoshoot every single time. It’s always better to be safe than sorry when it comes to file saving.
In this stage, you will need to organize your photos in a way that works for you—this step will make the other ones easier. You may choose to organize folders by day and then have client names within those folders. You may also choose to separate them by type of photography and then client name. There are a number of different ways for you to stay organized, so decide what works best.
Batch renaming is another great tool for you to help you stay organized—here you can change the file name from a generic number set to the client’s name or date so they will be easy to find when you move into the image selection and editing phases.
Finally, you need to ensure you add metadata to each of your photos. The reason this is important is because the metadata will stay on the image and is essential for identification and copyright protection. You can add or adjust your metadata in whichever imaging software you use. You’ll be able to add details like your name as the author, the date, etc.
Image Selection and Culling
And now it’s time for the selection process—depending on the type of photography, your deliverables will be very different, ranging from one headshot to an entire wedding. This part of the workflow requires you to carve out a solid chunk of your day to sift through images. “Culling” refers to selecting the best images from the session, which can help to speed up the rest of your workflow.
If you are working on a wedding, you may be culling a number of pictures as part of your deliverable, or if you’re doing a portrait shoot the final package may only consist of three edited photos. You will be able to optimize your workflow by developing a criteria to help you evaluate and select these photos—this could include looking for quality, composition, storytelling, and choosing the ones that matched your shot list, as well as removing blinks and blurry shots. You may also find that some of your test shots make it into your gallery.
You may also create a proofing gallery for your client to look through to choose which photos they will want for your final editing and retouching. There are different websites that you can use to optimize this process and make it safe so you know that clients aren’t downloading images they haven’t paid for. Format has this ability built-in to the site builder as Client Galleries, where you can upload digital proofs and clients can view and favorite images.
Editing and Retouching
Once you have selected the photos, it’s time to work on editing and retouching the ones you’ll deliver to the client. For this stage, you’ll likely use imaging software such as Lightroom or Photoshop. Some of the most common adjustments you’ll make include exposure adjustments, white balance, cropping, color correcting, etc.
Learning more advanced editing techniques may be a useful skill to build as a photographer—this type of retouching could include removing litter or small objects in the photo, skin retouching, fixing flyaway hairs, or even removing a stain on a shirt. Sometimes these small retouches are part of the package, but if they are more intricate and time consuming they may be billed as an add-on.
One more stage in the editing and retouching part of your workflow can be adding filters or effects to the photo. Some photographers have a certain standardized look across all photos that can be part of their stylized brand and this can be achieved through a filter. Whatever editing and retouching work you do at this stage, remember that you need to balance artistic vision while also delivering what the client wants.
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File Export and Optimization
Now we move into the delivery phase where you prepare to get the files delivered to your clients. To start we’ll break down different file formats you can use, with popular ones being JPEG, PNG and TIFF.
A TIFF or Tag Image File Format is a computer file used to store raster graphics and image information. This format makes it easy to store high-quality images before editing to avoid lossy file formats where images compress in an irreversible way. TIFF files may not display correctly outside of imaging softwares, so unless you are sending it to a client to be used for print, it may be better to choose JPEGs or PNGs.
JPEGs and PNGs are much more universal and can be easily viewed and used anywhere on the web. The other difference between TIFF and JPEGs or PNGs is the file size—TIFF files are generally very large, whereas JPEGs and PNGs are more economical and easier to share on social media.
When it comes to sharing images, gone are the days where you do a physical transfer using a CD or USB. When submitting to clients, often the photos will be too large to share in an email and will need to be moved through a File Transfer Protocol or FTP.
There are a number of different options for you. Websites like Pic-Time allow the clients to download high resolution photos from a custom gallery. There are also a number of file transfer programs like We Transfer, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Within Format, you have the option to enable full-resolution downloads via Client Galleries, or create a File Transfer for clients.
Whichever photo sharing method you use, it is important that you are able to deliver the photos without sacrificing the resolution. The photos that you share in your proofing gallery do not need to be high resolution, but the final deliverables do.
Image Storage and Organization
We’ve mentioned the importance of uploading and saving your photos once you’re finished with a shoot, but let’s talk about the image storage and organization part of your workflow. You’ll need to decide the appropriate time to store client images based on your needs, as well as archiving practices. Archiving is great for easy access and to avoid any data loss or damage that could occur for clients.
It’s important to determine what your policy and procedure when it comes to image storage will be. If you are a new photographer, you may not deal with a very large amount of images on a daily basis, but as you become more established you may need to develop a system to easily store and access your photos.
Develop a systematic approach to file management that works for you—you can do this by using cloud storage or external hard drives. If you are using an external hard drive, make sure you have a way to properly and safely store it. If you are using cloud storage, you’ll likely pay a subscription fee based on the amount of storage necessary.
Folders are your best friend. Keeping accurately named folders and image files within your folders is essential for easy access and recall. Organizing folders by month, type of shoot, client, or location can help to further break down the bulk of your images.
Outside of your client work folders, you may also opt to create a best-of or highlights folder to store a selection of your best work. You can add to this folder over time and use it on your website and social media platforms, and of course, go back to look at it with pride.
Sharing and Publishing
Delivering photos to clients isn’t the only sharing you need to consider, you’ll also need to choose ways to share and showcase your work online. Marketing your business can help it grow, so it’s important to keep your online portfolio up to date with photos that you are proud of and that show your skill as a photographer.
Beyond your website, you may want to use social media to share your work and connect with clients and fans. Consider weaving parts of your overall photography workflow into social media sites, too. For example, you can use an Instagram story to show some of the editing process before sharing the final images on your feed.
For the photos that you post on social media or on your website, you’ll want to consider optimizing them to the right size and resolution. Aesthetics is part of your brand so making sure that you share well-optimized images is important for your business. Always remember, quality over quantity.
Finally, you may want to consider watermarking as a form of safety for your images. While you may not opt to watermark images on your social media, it’s a good idea to slap a watermark on images that are uploaded to proofing galleries. Whether you’re using your own logo or some plain text, you may want to place your watermark where it doesn’t overpower the entire image but also in a way that is not easy to crop out.
Remember, you own these photos and it is easy for people to save them or screenshot them off the internet, so using a watermark on your images is one way to protect yourself.
Conclusion
And that’s it! If this master list of planning your photography workflow seems overwhelming, just take it just one step at a time. Start before your photoshoot with the planning, move through the photoshoot into the organizing, sorting, editing, exporting, storing, and then sharing. Following these phases will make your life so much easier.
Here’s how you can get started: open up a word doc or a notepad and write out the steps listed above in a master list, then build out the parts within. Choose steps that work for you so that you’ll be able to comfortably follow it. Make sure that you personalize your photography workflow every step of the way so that it fits your process. Remember, this should make your work more efficient and optimize your time, not something that is a burden. And don’t forget to stay flexible and adjust your master workflow whenever you need to.
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