Now that the which photo editing program challenge has been completed, I’m ready to post another challenge. This time EVERYONE can participate because it’s not specific to digital or traditional scrapbooking.

I want to hear about your photography workflow. What steps do you take to get your pictures from your camera to your blog and/or photo album.

To participate in the challenge, simply post the above Scrapbook Challenge icon on your blog with an entry detailing your photography workflow and then post a comment here on my blog so I can go read about your workflow. I will have something fun to give away, but I haven’t decided for sure what it will be yet. I hope that doesn’t deter you from entering the challenge to post your photography workflow! I don’t even know how I’ll award this prize…. perhaps to the person who has an even more wacky workflow than I (if that’s even possible) or perhaps to the person who has the most streamlined workflow or perhaps it’ll be a radom drawing. (LOL). If I waited to have all these details in place before I posted the challenge you already know it wouldn’t get posted until a year or more from now (LOL).

I know this is a busy time of the year so I’ll give you a week or so. I am anxious to revamp my wacky workflow and I hope to start on a new system right after Christmas so please don’t delay too long in sharing your workflow! THANKS!

I’ll start this challenge by sharing my WACKY WORKFLOW. It is pathetic. REALLY. It. Is. Pathetic.

1. Take pictures.
2. Edit on the fly so there are fewer pictures to delete when I get home.
3. Load pictures to the monthly folder in the 2008 folder of the My Pictures area of Windows.

Depending on how many pictures I have that belong in a subfolder sometimes I will:

a. If it’s about 1/2 and 1/2, I will usually unselect the ones that belong in a subfolder leaving them on my memory stick for this first round of downloading. Then, I go back and do those pictures separately so I can direct them to the correct subfolder (such as basketball, football, choir, volleyball, co-op etc) right from the start.

b. If there aren’t very many pictures that belong in a different category or if there are more than a couple of different categories of pictures then I will put all of them into the monthly folder mentioned above and then individually move them to the correct subfolder. I usually end up having to do this out of necessity especially if I’m headed to co-op or a ball game of some sort and don’t have time to go through the process of separating each type of picture two times at this point.

4. Quickly go through and do a first round of deleting bad pictures and paring down the number of ok pictures that I will keep.

If I’m going to upload to my blog then I:
5. Use the eraser function in My Pictures to white out any identification.

6. If any pictures need red eye removal I have to load them to my Creative Memories program to fix that. Then, export them to another folder in My Pictures. Sometimes I get lazy and skip the red eye fix until I’m actually ready to print and I just chose to not worry about having a red eyed photo on the blog.

7. Upload to photobucket. I can’t eliminate this step. I have to upload to photobucket since I don’t have any more free memory on blogger.

8. Resize, rotate, add a caption, etc., in photobucket before uploading to my blog. Ok…. so you all know that I’m sometimes lazy and skip this step as well. You know I’ve run out of time or energy when you see sideways pictures or ones that are smaller or larger than the size that fits nicely in the blog area I have to work within.

If I’m going to print the photo to put in an album:

5. Usually I don’t do anything, however, since I recently started using a few of the edit functions in the Creative Memories Memory Manager program, now I will usually go ahead and crop, use their auto correction, fix the red eye, etc., in that program before uploading or printing here at home.

6. If I have a dozen or more pictures to print then I will upload to Shutterfly, Costco, or Walmart. If I have less than a dozen or so then I will print them right here at home on one of my two photo printers.

7. Hopefully put the picture in a photo album. If not in an album, then it goes in one of my many piles waiting to be scrapbooked.

If I’m going to do a Smilebox digital page:

5. Load the pictures into my Smilebox program.

6. Create a digital scrapbook page.

7. Move the page into a program (such as Printshop) that allows a 12×36 canvas.

8. Drag/drop 3 pages each measuring 12×12 onto the 12×36 canvas.

9. Save all 3 together as a new .jpg image.

10. After I have 3-4 of these 12×36 pages to print I save them to my jump drive because you can’t upload this size to Costco.com.

11. Take jump drive to Costco for printing and I use their big cutters to cut the pages into their 12×12 size.

12. Bring pages home and insert into album’s page protectors.

Now you see why I’m so anxious to get an all in one type program where I can edit and digitally scrapbook the photos in the same place where I store them.

The above isn’t even my main reason for wanting to get a program that will make my wacky workflow more effecient. The MAIN reason I need more efficiency is because I spend literally HOURS AND HOURS searching for a particular photo because I’m not able to tag or label them in the My Pictures section of the Widows program. UGH! Adding a search function is my #1 reason for looking at a different program.

Ok. So please share your photography workflow!