No one enjoys all the administrative tasks that come with working as a professional in product photography. One of the most time-consuming aspects is the workflow, which involves downloading and organising all images, and then finding them as required for the editing phase of the project.

By improving the product photography workflow, you can not only save time and money but also improve the quality of your work. Here are some top tips on how to improve the workflow of your fashion and jewellery photography.

Use automation

We work in a digital world, with automation becoming a part of so much of our daily lives. So why don’t we take advantage of that in product photography? The traditional approach for many is to insert a memory card, create the folders and structure you need and then export images from the card to those folders.

This takes up significant time that could be spent working on the editing phase of a project or even working on another project altogether. Systems out there right now can create folders, name conventions, include metadata etc for you. Make sure to explore the software you use and see what features can help automate your process.

Tagged and untagged images

Thanks to the quality of photography equipment and the high resolutions that we can now shoot in, storage is a premium. A great way to speed up your workflow is to tag images that you wish to keep or utilise on a project, such as for your latest jewellery photography client.

The software you use will then let you simply delete any untagged images and free up large amounts of space almost instantly. We’re prone to keeping far more images than we really need and spending extra time searching and deleting is a waste of your time.

Create highlight collections

In product photography and when shooting personal projects, you will always end up wanting to find your best photographs. You don’t want to search through your entire portfolio every time you go back to them or whilst working in post-production.

A great way to tackle this is to create collections, and highlights of particular shots or locations. By going directly to a highlights folder for a specific date or product you can save a lot of time. Fortunately, many of the leading software brands will help with this process.

Remember to backup

We’ve all been guilty of failing to back up as effectively or frequently as we should and everyone working in product photography will know that feeling that you may have lost photographs. As a result, remembering to back up your files and doing it in the right way is absolutely key to improving your workflow.

Aside from having the images on your main hard drive, it is always advisable to have them in a second and even third location. Whether that is a combination of another hard drive off-site at an office or safe deposit box, or cloud storage it is up to you. By ensuring at least one backup is off-site, should the worst happen then you can access that off-site backup and start back up again.