Turns out the solution is simple routine. So the workflow I came up with:

Import photos into “source folders” - these are the dated, event/shoot/week based folders I’ve already been using. Once they are imported (or at the end of the week for the personal “Journal” folders), I create a Lightroom collection that I sync to LR cloud. I then cull/rate the photos (this can happen on any device, since the collection is synced) and edit the selects.

Here’s the new stuff: after editing, I add the top selects to yearly area/topic based portfolio collections (eg. street, trips, personal, reportage, etc.) and to any relevant projects, like my ongoing, overarching project about Hungarian identity. I then export anything above a three star rating to a disk I only keep final JPEGs on, in the same folder structure that the RAWs are in. Once I’ve done the export, I unsync and remove the source collection.

I also set a monthly reminder for the first Sunday of every month to go through the project and portfolio collections and do exports from there as well, to dedicated project and portfolio folders on the JPEG disc. This means that I have the top images in duplicate, once in the source folder and once in the project or portfolio folder. As these are rolling folders (meaning I keep adding to them), I can just check the file count against the count in the collections to quickly see if I have any new images in the collection I need to export. I also plan to mirror the folder structure and exports from the JPEG disk to SmugMug, just to make sure I have my “positives” there as well.

Is this a bit complicated? Sure. Is this absolutely future proof? Hell yes. Whatever computer I’m on in the future, whether I still use Lightroom or whether Adobe as a company even exists, I’m ultimately only dealing with files in folders. I assume if I have no way to view JPEGs in folders on a disk, I have bigger problems than my photo archive.

So this was today’s project, and I am pretty pleased with where I ended up.

Well, anyway.