On using the iPhone to streamline your Lightroom workflow
On saturday, I shot my first «gig» where I was taking pictures all on my own and even got a little money out of it. It was the graduation prom of the school I graduated from last year, and I got asked by the organizing comittee if I wanted to take some nice pictures of the venue, the audience and what was going on on stage.
I packed my lenses, a flash and my girlfriend’s Nikon D90, as I wanted to take a camera with better handling than my D5100. I managed to get 1421 pictures that night and was really happy with how most of them turned out.
After I imported all the images into Lightroom, I thought about the best way to organize all these files into two categories (usable, and not that usable).
You see, sorting photos in Lightroom is a built in feature, but it can be a little painful to use. You can hit «P» if you want to keep a picture, you can hit «X» if you want to throw it out and you can create smart collections to order your photos by this data.
As you might know, the «P» and the «X» keys are fairly far from each other, and in combination with hitting the arrow keys to go through your images all the time, your fingers are sure to form a pretzel after a short amount of time.
So what was my awesome idea to avoid this?
I remembered having an app on my iPhone called «Joypad» (which was recently split into two apps, the part that I needed now called «Joypad Legacy»). Its purpose is to enable you to control games on your PC or Mac using your iPhone as a controller via Wi-Fi. You can map the controls shown on your iPhone to any button you want to, which makes it great not only for games, but for many repetitive tasks that do not need many keys or mouse interaction.
So I installed the latest version of the app as well as the Mac software, configured it so the A-button would be «P», the B-Button would be «X» and the directional pad would be the arrow keys.
After I made sure it worked, I switched all the panels in Lightroom off to have a nice big view of my photos on my screen. With my iPhone in hand and the Laptop on the table in front of me, I was able to work through all my photos in almost no time. And without destroying my fingers.
