Chapter 30 — Exercises

Workflow is learned by doing it to your own files, so most of these exercises ask you to ingest, cull, keyword, name, and back up real images — yours. A phone library counts as a real library; everything here has a phone path. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Several of these directly build the managed collection your Portfolio Checkpoint requires — so nothing here is busywork.

A safety note before you start: wherever an exercise involves deleting files, do it only after the images exist in at least one other place (a backup or a rejects holding folder). Practice the chapter's own rule while you practice the chapter.

Part A — The pipeline (Settings Drill & Shoot This)

Exercise 30.1 ⭐ — Write your ingest checklist. On an index card or a phone note, write the four moves of a good ingest in order (§30.1), in your own words, specific to the tool you actually use. Tape it where you import photos. The card is the deliverable; the point is that your pipeline becomes a thing you can follow, not a thing you reinvent each time.

Exercise 30.2 ⭐⭐ — Run one real ingest, by the book. Take an actual card or phone full of recent photos and ingest it deliberately: copy (don't move), verify the count, rename to your convention, and make a second copy — before you so much as cull. Write down the file count at each stage (on card / in library / in backup). They must match. Do not format or clear the source until all three match.

Exercise 30.3 ⭐⭐ — The format-the-card decision. Write, in one or two sentences, the exact condition under which you will allow yourself to reformat a memory card, stated as a rule you could hand to an assistant. Then explain in one more sentence what disaster the rule prevents. (This is the single most expensive habit in photography; commit your rule to memory.)

Exercise 30.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Diagram your current pipeline and find the gap. Draw the path your photos actually take today, from card to wherever they end up, as a flow diagram like Figure 30.1. Mark with a red asterisk every point where a file currently exists in only one place. Most people find at least one. Write the one change that would close the most dangerous gap, and make that change this week.

Part B — Culling (Fix the Photo & Five Conditions)

Exercise 30.5 ⭐ — Time your reject pass. Open any take of 100+ frames you have never culled. Run only Pass 1 (§30.2): mark as reject every frame that is technically dead — soft where it matters, blinked, badly mis-exposed, or a clearly weaker duplicate. Move fast; ask only "is this dead?" Time yourself and record how many you rejected. Most people clear 70–90% in well under ten minutes and feel lighter for it.

Exercise 30.6 ⭐⭐ — The two-frame duel. Find two near-identical frames of the same moment in your library (a burst is perfect). Put them side by side and decide, with a written reason, which one wins and which you reject. Name the specific difference that decided it (eyes open vs. closed; peak gesture vs. early; focus landed vs. drifted). Then actually reject the loser. Keeping both is keeping neither.

Exercise 30.7 ⭐⭐ — Full two-pass cull, with numbers. Run the complete two-pass cull on a real take of 200+ frames. Record the funnel: total frames → Pass 1 survivors → ★★★ → ★★★★ → ★★★★★. Then write two sentences: how many keepers you ended with, and how many of the rejected frames you genuinely miss an hour later. (Almost always: none.)

Exercise 30.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — Rate your whole last year. Pick one past year's worth of unrated photos and apply only the reject pass plus a single "keeper" flag — no fine ratings, just dead-or-keep. This is the deferred maintenance most libraries need. Report the before and after counts. You are reclaiming your library from the hoard, and your future searches just got faster.

Part C — Keywords, metadata, and findability (Read the Frame & Settings Drill)

Exercise 30.9 ⭐ — The five-keyword sweep. Select one entire take and apply, in a single action, the four-or-five keywords true of all of it: location, broad subject, season/event, and (if relevant) client or project (§30.3). Confirm a search for one of those keywords now returns the whole shoot. You just made hundreds of photos findable in thirty seconds.

Exercise 30.10 ⭐⭐ — Find the lost photo. Think of a specific photo you know you own but would struggle to locate by folder ("the one of the red maple in fog"). Time how long it takes to find by browsing. Then add three good keywords to it and confirm it surfaces in a one-second search. The contrast is the lesson: stop relying on where, start relying on what.

Exercise 30.11 ⭐⭐ — Write metadata that doubles as alt text. Choose three of your keepers and write each a caption that is simultaneously (a) searchable for you and (b) a usable image description for a blind reader (§30.3 ♿). Name the subject, the light, and the place in one tight sentence each ("Red maple in river fog, north trail, late afternoon"). Two skills, one field.

Exercise 30.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Audit your "where does metadata live?" risk. Pick one keyworded photo, copy the bare file to another folder or device without its catalog, and check whether the keywords and caption travelled with it (§30.3 🔬). Report what you find. If the tags vanished, set your tool to write metadata to the files (or sidecars) so your photographs carry their own descriptions.

Part D — Backup: the 3-2-1 rule (Fix the Photo)

Exercise 30.13 ⭐ — Count your single points of failure. List every place your photos currently live and, beside each group, write how many independent copies exist (§30.4). Circle every photo set that exists in only one place. The circled items are one accident from gone. The honest count is the deliverable; sit with the number.

Exercise 30.14 ⭐⭐ — Build the missing leg. Identify which leg of 3-2-1 you are missing today — most people lack the offsite copy — and add it. Set up either an automatic cloud backup or a second external drive you keep elsewhere, for your most irreplaceable images at minimum. Report which leg you added and how it is now automated so you never have to remember it.

Exercise 30.15 ⭐⭐ — Test a backup you already trust. Open an actual file from your backup (not your working copy) and confirm it works (§30.4). If you have no backup to test, that is your finding — and your most urgent task. A backup you have never restored from is a hope, not a backup.

Exercise 30.16 ⭐⭐⭐ — The fire drill. Imagine your home or studio is gone overnight — every device in it destroyed at once. Write exactly which of your photographs survive and how you would recover them. If the honest answer is "none" or "I'm not sure," fix it: get one offsite copy of your irreplaceable work in place this week, then re-run the thought experiment until the answer is "all of them."

Part E — Folders, names, and the catalog (Recreate It & Fix the Photo)

Exercise 30.17 ⭐ — Adopt one naming convention. Decide on a single file-naming convention (§30.5) — e.g. YYYY-MM-DD_shoot-slug_seq — and write it down as the rule you will never deviate from. Rename one recent shoot to it by hand or at ingest. The power is in the consistency, not the exact format.

Exercise 30.18 ⭐⭐ — Reshape one messy folder into the dated scheme. Take one chaotic folder (New Folder (2) energy) and reorganize its contents into the YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD shoot/ structure of Figure 30.6. If you use a catalog, do the moving inside the catalog application. Confirm afterward that nothing is a broken link. Report how many sub-folders it collapsed into a clean tree.

Exercise 30.19 ⭐⭐ — Diagnose the broken-link scenario. Without doing anything destructive, write out: what exactly goes wrong when you drag catalogued photo folders to a new drive in the file browser, why every photo shows as "missing" even though the files are fine, and the correct two-step response (prevention + the relocate fix). You are rehearsing the recovery before you need it (§30.5).

Exercise 30.20 ⭐⭐⭐ — Make your tree tool-independent. Verify that your folder-and-naming system is legible without any application: open your top-level photo folder in a plain file browser and confirm you can navigate to any shoot by date and read what each file roughly is from its name alone. If you can't, tighten the names until you can. This is what protects you if your software ever disappears.

Part F — Delivery and archiving (Settings Drill & Shoot This)

Exercise 30.21 ⭐⭐ — One master, three exports. Take one developed master and produce three purpose-built exports (§30.6): a full-resolution print file, a screen-sized sharpened web version (long edge ~2048 px, sRGB), and a small watermarked proof. Confirm you did not alter or overwrite the master. Note the file-size difference and which destination each serves.

Exercise 30.22 ⭐⭐⭐ — Archive a finished project, then prove you can recover it. Choose one genuinely finished project and archive it as a self-contained package (§30.6): originals + edit recipe/sidecars + full-res finals + a plain-text note saying what it is, when, and for whom. Store one copy offsite. Then, the next day, recover it cold — open it as if you'd forgotten everything — and confirm the note and files make the project fully reconstructable. Write down anything future-you would have been missing.

Part G — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 30.23 ⭐⭐ — Cull on develop-ability (Ch.26). During a Pass-2 cull, hold two technically similar frames side by side and choose the keeper partly on which will develop better — which holds highlight and shadow detail with no clipping, which has the cleaner shadows to lift (Ch.26). Write the reason. Culling and developing are one continuous judgment, not two.

Exercise 30.24 ⭐⭐ — Keyword the red door's whole arc (Ch.3, 5, 7, 8, 26, 28). Gather every version of the red door you have shot across the book — exposed, golden vs. flat, the color study, the B&W study, the developed and converted versions — into one place and give them a shared keyword (red-door) plus a per-version keyword. Confirm one search now returns the entire arc. This is the chapter's "file by capture, find by keyword" applied to the book's signature subject.

Exercise 30.25 ⭐⭐ — Protect the portfolio (Ch.1 → 30). Locate your 00-before baseline from Chapter 1 and your strongest current keeper. Put both under 3-2-1 protection and keyword them as portfolio images. Write one sentence on how it would feel to lose the baseline now — the photograph that proves how far you've come — and let that feeling cement the backup habit.

Exercise 30.26 ⭐⭐⭐ — Build the search you'll need in Chapter 40. Looking ahead to the capstone, define five searches you will want to run to assemble your final portfolio ("all portraits," "all golden-hour," "everything ★★★★ and up," "all night/long-exposure," "the red-door arc"). Then add whatever keywords and ratings are missing so that each of those five searches returns the right set today. You are pre-loading the curation that Chapter 34 and Chapter 40 will ask of you.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 30.27 ⭐⭐⭐ — The full lifecycle, one shoot, end to end. Take a single new shoot and run it through the entire pipeline of Figure 30.1 in one sitting, documenting each stage: ingest (with counts and second copy), two-pass cull (with the funnel numbers), keywording (whole take + keepers), one developed keeper, three deliverable exports, and an archived self-contained package under 3-2-1. Then write a one-paragraph post-mortem: where did you slow down, what would you automate, and what is the one habit from this that you will keep forever. This single exercise is the whole chapter made real, and it is the truest preparation for managing ten thousand photos without going insane.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Do each with your real files before reading them — in workflow, as in shooting, the attempt is the lesson, and the files you protect tonight are the ones you'll still have in ten years.