When I’m not busy installing Windows 7, I’ve often, lately, burned countless hours working on another intractable problem: work flow. You’d think a guy in my straits would not be too concerned about ‘work,’ much less ‘flow.’

But we do ‘work’ in the physics sense of the word, if not in the ‘get-a-paycheck’ sense. I write a blog, I contribute to another blog (which requires collaboration with other contributors and at least one editor) and I’m trying to organize my life’s work, mainly photographs, into a publishable database.

WordPress with MarsEdit makes for a great, easy-to-use one-blogger workflow but MarsEdit doesn’t connect to many of WordPress’ newest features (at least in the Thesis theme) like tagging and SEO. I also can’t adjust the image thumbnails to be useful in the column widths I’ve set for my blog. Using the newer features means reloading the page in a separate, browser-based editor.

WordPress and Thesis also undergird InMenlo, where we all use the browser-based editor, which drives me nuts, especially the media-upload feature. One drawback is that the specific workflow we have use to get the archive formatting we want hides photos from the people who are supposed to caption them, clearly sub-optimal.

And archiving for an individual photographer with a lot of photos is just unsolved. There’s a patchwork of about a half dozen products that is used by most pros, but it’s not pretty. The cloud has things like Flickr and Picasaweb, but these are really galleries or online photo albums intended for casual browsing, not really suitable for my needs. Any clues, readers…?

{ 1 comment }