My Photo Editing Process

I’ve been a hobby photographer for some years now, focusing almost entirely on the many travel photos my wife, Lisa, and I have taken during our trips around the world. When it comes to processing those photos, I’ll be the first to admit I’ve made plenty of mistakes. Fortunately, none have been catastrophic, though I do wish I could revisit some of my earliest edits.

Over time, I’ve tried to learn from experience and continually refine my process, polishing the steps I use to go from initial JPG to final TIFF. In case anyone else is sitting on a backlog of travel photos and wondering how much work is involved, or where to start, I thought I’d share how I approach things today, and why. Maybe you’ll find something useful.

Create Directory Structure on PC for Photos

My photos need a place to live. For me, that means storing them in Lightroom — but before that can happen, I need to get them off my mobile devices and onto my desktop PC. That doesn’t mean just doing a data dump. I put some real thought into how photos are stored on disk.

I’ve seen enough “permanent” software solutions vanish over the years — Netscape, AmiPro — to know that organizing for longevity is worth the effort. If Lightroom disappeared tomorrow, I want to be able to understand when and where my photos were taken, and by whom.

Here’s a sample folder structure I use:

Travel Photos

└── Caribbean

└── 2017 Cuba

└── Jeff’s Cuba Photos

└── 2017-03-25 Jeff-NOTE5 (Miami)

This gives me relevant data at a glance: location, date, device, and photographer. Once files are copied to the right folders, I move on to Lightroom.

Load All Photos into Lightroom

Although I use Lightroom to catalog and track all my photos, I rarely use it for editing since Photoshop is where I feel more at home.

Before importing from my hard drive into Lightroom, I make sure the folders are where I want them on disk. Then I import them into Lightroom. This is key: once imported, I no longer make folder changes using Windows. All renaming or moving happens within Lightroom to preserve the catalog’s internal links. Break those, and you invite a world of needless hassle.

Perform Photo Prep in Lightroom

Apply Keywords

I always keyword my photos early — the sooner, the better. I’ve had too many “surprises” over the years to trust anything that isn’t embedded. Keywording also helps me evaluate the batch and weed out the unusable ones.

Most of our trips produce hundreds of images each. This is a chance to sort the wheat from the chaff. I rarely delete photos unless they’re blank or truly hopeless, but only a fraction make it to slideshows or the website.

My keyword system is something I’ve refined over time. It answers five questions:

• What (is in the photo?)
• When (was it taken?)
• Where (was it taken?)
• Who (is in it?)
• Why (was it taken — event, context, etc.?)

If anyone wants to see my full keyword structure, I’m happy to share it.

Save Metadata

Once keywording is done, I save the metadata to embed everything directly into the image files. That way, if I ever have to rebuild a catalog or start from scratch, my hard work is still intact.

Perform Editing in Photoshop

Review Photos

By now, I’ve already made one full pass for keywording, sometimes through 1,200+ images. It takes time. I take breaks. This is labor, but also joy.

I edit all decent shots from both Lisa and me – partly for redundancy, mostly because I want her to have as rich a library of memories as possible. I launch edits from within Lightroom, sending the image to Photoshop. I work exclusively in JPG, then save edits as lossless TIFFs and stack them with the originals in Lightroom.

Edit the Photo

Every photo gets analyzed. I might crop, adjust exposure, enlarge a section, or apply filters. Sometimes I do nothing at all.

This is where the learning happens, and I’m still learning. I’m even going back to re-edit older photos now that my tools and skills have improved. The mistakes from earlier edits are easy to spot, but when I nail one, it’s deeply satisfying.

Optimize Photos

TIFFs are massive. Too big for slideshows or websites. So I use a Photoshop script to create optimized JPGs – smaller files that retain quality but load faster. These go into a dedicated “Optimized” folder, ready for publishing.

Annotate Photos

Once editing and optimization are done, I revisit each photo in the Optimized folder to write a short title or description — just enough to identify what the viewer is seeing. I add this to the Title field in the file’s properties, which my gallery software reads and displays on my website.

At this point, the photos are ready to share, either online or in slideshows. It’s a long process, but it’s mine. And in the end, it helps keep our memories alive in a way that’s personal, structured, and creatively satisfying.