Archiving Brackets

[LHA PHOTO]

I am an auto motive Photographer and much of my work includes heavy bracketing. I often when shooting ad work of cars outdoors run a 5 frame bracket with variations on that. My client might want headlights on and off. Marker lights on and off, top up/down wheels straight and turned. One angle of a car might have 15-20 frames in reference. How are others dealing with bracketed frames. I need to know they are there but might not want to see all in the catalog. Most of the images are of no use to me in the end but my clients need them. They are part of my deliverable. I am open to suggestions. Thanks

Lee

[johnbeardy]

What cataloguing program are you using? This is a typical use for stacks, which you see in Lightroom, Aperture, Elements Organizer.

John

[LHA PHOTO]

I am using Iview for my cataloging. I have found the workflow to best suit my needs. I have used Aperture in the past but I really like the indexing in IView. Stacks would work great but that is not in Iview.

[johnbeardy]

We've asked for it!

One idea is to use custom fields. I use one for images shot as components of stitched panoramas or for HDR merging, entering the filename of the first image in the series (in your case the pick image) into this field. For efficiency, I do this with a script, selecting the items and then running the script. It keeps the related images together but it doesn't hide them like stacks. You might have a second custom field marked "pick".

There's also the capture sets feature which might work with your volumes. It automatically builds catalog sets based on the interval between shots. As you process a shoot, run this command and then rename the overall set. Again, just something you might try on a test catalogue.

John

[peterkrogh]

Lee,
I deal with my brackets by not starring them.  I'll star the one frame to show to the clients, and the rest are handled and archived normally, and only get used if I need to pull en element from them (or make an HDR image).

I've been using one of my labels to indicate Pano frames (which are another kind of image that is not likely to be used on its own, but wants to be archived).  I'll probably amend this practice very soon to have that label be pano-bracket. 

Peter