How professional photographers plan for and prepare for trips is one of the ways to pros are differentiated from (most) hobbyists, and I don’t mean only in how they get from point A to point B. Rather, it’s the pre-work done at home in the weeks ahead of time that can make or break the success of a photography trip or an assignment.

Jared and I are on our way to Panama, currently soaring through the skies at 525 miles per hour and on our way up to a cruising altitude of about 35,000 feet. While this trip is specifically for our annual workshop here, we’ve built in a few days ahead of time for our own photography work and to again scout the locations we use, making sure things are still as active as we remember before bringing clients to these places in a few days.

I was in the midst of planning for this trip when I did a portfolio review for one of our mentorship members, Jeremy (hi, Jeremy!). He suggested an article about how Jared and I keep our massive archives of photography organized, so I thought our Panama trip would be a good jumping-off point for a series on professional-level organization and workflow, but also on how we prepare for big trips where we MUST come back with results.

For this trip, our “results” are defined by two major areas of our work. First, we need photographs of our own to license and sell, and we need them for marketing our workshop here, which has evolved significantly from years past. Second, we have to make sure that the clients who have invested their time and money in traveling with us come away with an experience they loved and photographs they cannot wait to share with their friends and family upon return. We try to do the bulk of our personal photography work before or after workshop clients are with us; workshops are not photography vacations.

The first thing we do when we’re getting ready for a location-based photography trip is to assess our current archives - what we have already and what gaps in our collection we need to fill. With just a few days before workshop clients arrive, we need to make the most of each and every outing. The last thing I want to do is add more of the same images to my collection. Every photography outing is an opportunity to create, improve upon, and expand upon my existing collection of photography. For me, that means that I’m looking at my archive through a few different lenses:

• What gaps exist in my personal archive of tier-one stock (selling direct to clients)?

• What gaps exist in the archive of the stock agencies who represent my work? What photos can I make on this trip that will fill this gap?

• What photographs in my archive do I want to get rid of?

That last question is a big one for me because I only ever want to show and sell my best work. I’m always happy to “digitally declutter” and get rid of images that no longer have a place in my collection of work. I regularly cull through and delete old work if and when I can replace it with something better. I leave them in my cloud-based archive for posterity and “just in case,” but there’s no reason for me to take up valuable hard drive storage space with photos that will never see the light of day again.

So… how do you do that?

If you’ve taken our “Mastering Lightroom for Wildlife Photographers” workshop, then you know that Jared and I created that workshop after realizing that, despite coming into our professional photography careers on entirely different paths, we had a nearly-identical professional workflow. While our finished photographs end up in our own personal style and aesthetic, our methodology to get to a finished product is one and the same.

Then we realized that most wildlife photographers don’t take advantage enough of one of Lightroom’s most robust features - photo organization. It’s such an incredible tool that we spend the entire first day and most of the second day of that workshop getting people set up to never need to dig or hunt for their photos again.

Organization isn’t something most photographers think about long-term when they first get started with their hobby. But, as you begin to amass hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands (and then, like us, hundreds of thousands) of photos, it can quickly spiral out of control. Before long, your library of photos feels overwhelming and I’d be willing to bet that at least half of you reading this article have a hard drive (or two or three) of photos from years ago that you probably will never go back to because it’s just too much - and I bet you won’t delete anything off those drives, either.

When you get a request from an editor or when a photo needs list finds its way into your email, you don’t want to be the photographer who needs days to figure out and find where “that one photo of that one animal” is. As we have written about before, one of the best ways to find success is to be a photographer who is easy to work with, quick to respond, and provides solutions for editors and clients. It’s often the case that the first “good” photo submission is the one that ends up purchased. Thus, you don’t want to find yourself in a position where you’re hunting through hard drives trying to remember what images are stored and where they are when those requests make their way to you.

Similarly, you don’t want to be in a position where you get such a request, only to feel so overwhelmed by the thought of finding the photos that you simply do not even try.

Most of what I’ve encountered in working with other wildlife photographers is that they’ve organized their folders by date first, then with a location, and then they’ve named their file name something with the species name in it. Some photographers create a new catalog for every location or shoot. Both Jared and I have a “one catalog to rule them all” philosophy - we just have the one. The exception, for me, is that I’ll create a new catalog if I am on an assignment and know that I’ll have to send a catalog to an editor or publication (a very rare request). Or, if I’m doing a one-off event for a client and I plan on sending out the catalog to a third-party editing service to cull and edit those photos for me. But otherwise, everything from my wildlife photos to my vacation photos to the occasional photography for my family to my NGO work all stays in one large catalog.

The challenge with using a date-based system is that eventually, the years start to all blend together, “Was that Panama 2021 or 2022?” If you have a favorite place you visit often, you’ll end up with a folder for that spot in multiple years, and things start blending together. A similar conundrum is created with multiple catalogs. Each one needs a name, which is easy enough, but when Lightroom updates, it’s going to “convert” older catalogs to the new format, and over the course of a few years you can end up with names like “Panama_Wildlife_Catalog_v10_1.lrcat” and you can’t remember which version was converted and when. So if you simply agree to update the catalog, you make a new version every time.

Powering up Lightroom, I start by going right to a Smart Collection called “Panama,” which contains all of the photos I’ve ever kept from my trips to the country. It’s as simple as clicking on a folder because I’ve created an automated “rule” in Lightroom that takes every photo to which I’ve ever added the keyword “Panama” and slides it into my “Panama” Smart Collection. Thus, I simply choose that collection, and all of my Panama photos appear in the tray below for me to scroll through.

I use Smart Collections to stay organized and keep my different “buckets of photos” isolated in their own way. Some people will create multiple folders on their hard drives and export multiple copies of photos to delineate between version (e.g., “final image” vs. “social media” vs. “contest entries”), but that eventually duplicates efforts, taking up a lot of space on your hard drives over time. If you’re staying on top of things in Lightroom, there is no need to have multiple copies of photos in different sizes and formats in your hard storage space.

Our photos in Lightroom are not finished files until we export them. While they are in the program, they are simply bundles of data and metadata that are rendered into images for us to work with. Smart Collections work by pointing different rules to the same photo, without duplicating that photo or making extra copies of it.

For example, here are some of the Smart Collections I have set up:

• Birds

• Yellowstone

• Panama

• Alaska

• Portfolio

• Social Media

• Black Bears

• Owls

• Stock

• Fine Art

• Family

• Events

• Vacation

They are all fairly self-explanatory, but you can see that they aren’t just species-based or location-based. When I have an image I think would be good for social media, I add the keyword “social media” to the metadata and it will be automagically added to that Smart Collection. If it’s an image I think would make a nice addition to my portfolio, I also add “portfolio” to the keywords. If it’s something I am submitting to my stock agency, then it gets a keyword just for that, too.

I keep everything I photograph in one catalog because photos of my family are easily parsed out just by clicking the “Family” smart collection. No jumping in between folders or catalogs - everything is in one place. When it’s time to update my website, I don’t have to search through years worth of photography to do so, I can just review the selection of images I’ve been tagging as possibilities all year long. It’s impossible to calculate the time I’ve saved over the years by simply keeping on top of these tasks as I edit my photos.

Objectively Assessing Your Archive

The biodiversity of Panama is incredible, and it’s one of my favorite trips of the year. Looking at my archive, however, it actually doesn’t represent the biodiversity of the country as much as I thought it did when I came home with my photos last year. Walking through my archive and objectively and holistically looking at what I have and need looks like this:

I have a lot of portraits, but I’m lacking in wider, more environmental shots that help establish a sense of place - a must for any photo essay or story I might ever want to pitch.

As well, I don’t have many photos that demonstrate behaviors that are species-specific. For example, I have some beautiful photos of snail kites, but nothing with an actual snail in the talons of a snail kite. Not only is that something that would be far more interesting to an editor because it shows a specific behavior, but it’s also relevant to my work as a conservation photojournalist. The snail kites only began migrating to Panama in the 1990s, they weren’t always here. And why? They followed one of their primary sources of food, the apple snail. The aquarium trade brought these apple snails to other parts of the world, which resulted in a lot of apple snails being released in the wild, which altered the environmental aquaculture of these places considerably. There’s a bigger story there, and recognizing that I could use images that tell the story of the changes to snail kite territory and migration patterns is part of my pre-trip work, too - always be looking at the possibilities that align with your work goals.

I also am less than thrilled with my collection of red-billed tropicbird photos; they’re mostly in front of the large cliffs in which they nest, but I don’t have many showing off the epic island-based rookery or the water swells crashing up against the rocks below.

Looking through the rest of the collection, I can see that I will be hard-pressed to find better opportunities with the tiger herons this year, though it would be nice to find an adult - all I have are images of a juvenile. Similarly, I’ll be looking for moments when the white-faced capuchins are farther away from their background; the background in the photos of them I have in this set are all a touch too detailed for my liking.

A simple scroll through my collection means that I’ve been able to identify my photo needs for this trip in about half an hour, start to finish. I didn’t have to remember the dates of the trip or search hard drives for finished images. It also means that if a photo needs email comes through looking for hummingbirds, I can easily go to my Panama or my Birds Smart Collections and export images to send to an editor for consideration. Or, when my mom emails me asking for a copy of a family photo (again), I can go right to all of my family photos and send her a copy.

Going into a photography trip with my own marching orders means I can apply some focus to the outing as a whole. I can wait out a situation and photographs with intention instead of “hoping” to come back with something I needed in my collection. Pre-production also helps photographers avoid “Spray and Pray Syndrome,” too.

There is nothing gained but more time behind a computer when you over-photograph a situation to the point that editing and cataloging your work is daunting and cumbersome. Staying organized from the outset keeps your business ready to thrive and keeps you in the field making more of the photographs you love.