New family photo workflow

Adobe Lightroom is importing 45GB of photos – so I might take advantage of having a few spare moments…

As I think I may have previously mentioned, I went from very little interest in photography, to a total love of capturing visual memories around the time my son was born, in late 2006. Back then, with a newborn in the house, time radically became more compressed, and so a super simple and quick workflow was essential, or the backlog would be insurmountable. I gave Picasa and Picasaweb a try, and it seemed to perfectly suit our needs, and indeed for most of the last 5 years it has been perfect – which me using the picasaweb data feed + simple XSLT to create our own simple frontage for the Picasaweb albums.

The arrival of Google+ seems to have thoroughly altered my perception of the focus my google/goolge+/picasaweb profile should have, and as such I intend to greatly par down the vast photo repositories now associated with my day to day Google profile (https://plus.google.com/+BenSeymour).

I have now repeatedly tried and failed to carry out the supposedly simple Picasaweb migration to a secondary account, which would have made life much simpler, and as such I tihk it is time to finally look at a completely new family photo workflow – including finally switching to Adobe Lightroom. As I’ve been an Adobe employee for the last 5 years switching to Lightroom has been on my really-should-do list for much of that time too.

Lightroom import is now at 67% so I’d better stop rambling….

So, my objectives, requirements and intentions:

1) I would to like move to some more descriptive/wordy photo blog style photo albums – extra descriptions to add in what can’t be easily captured in an image, and ideally less photos to make it more focused. My good friend and colleague Andrew Hathaway has several times commented that ‘often less is more’ shortly after looking at some of our family albums

— for this I am currently exploring WordPress + Photocrati, ideally with a Lightroom plugin/export to Photocrati

2) I still want to maintain the more extensive everything-that-happened-this-month type online albums, as we live several hours away from our family, and the Grandparents are especially interested in still being able to experience the drinking from the water hose experience…

— for this I could just switch to a second Picasaweb account… but I find myself thinking perhaps it is time for a change and so may explore a Flickr Pro account (suggestions gratefully received)