The Ultimate Aftershoot and Lightroom Workflow

To my knowledge, this is the only workflow that will allow you to perform the following actions all in one process, while you sleep.

1. 1. Ingest photos off memory cards

1. 1. Back up photos to a secondary drive

1. 1. Perform AI culling with Aftershoot

1. 1. Import all photos into an Adobe Lightroom catalogue

1. 1. Build Smart Previews

1. 1. Perform AI editing with Aftershoot

1. 1. Open the catalogue in Lightroom again, ready to review AI culled and edited images.

We all love AI culling and editing and the life-changing impact it has made on our editing time. With that massive time save, we are improving our businesses, and becoming better parents, partners and friends.

I am someone who is very particular about where I spend my time, and I want to make sure I’m not doing anything that could be either automated or outsourced.

I’ve been dreaming about a product that can cull and edit on Lightroom Import. I expect this is on the horizon, but until we get there, I decided to make my own automation which anyone can do with the following steps.

You’ll need to build your workflow yourself as it records your screen. It’s not something I can share with you as our screen sizes and resolutions will be different.

You’ll have to start by downloading and installing Keyboard Maestro

After installing it, you’ll need to grant the necessary permissions.

Now create a New Macro

Go through your normal process of how you would leave your computer ingesting photos off your memory card into Aftershoot and begin building your automation from the ‘Start Culling’ phase which kicks in once Aftershoot has finished the ingest. You will be in bed when this happens so you’re looking for a trigger, something that changes on the screen when it’s ready to start culling. I explain the different triggers I use in this video:

I used a combination of the following triggers to replicate my Aftershoot and Lightroom Workflow:

• Pause
• Pause Until Conditions are Met
• Press Button
• Move and Click from the Center of a Found Image

You can see my entire workflow here:

Tips to keep in mind

1. Make your Lightroom and Aftershoot windows full screen so the buttons are always in the same position.
2. Before you start ingesting into Aftershoot, leave Lightroom open on the Import window, with the import folder selected, with ‘Include Subfolders’ turned off and ‘Build Smart Previews’ turned on.
3. Add a step in the workflow to tick the ‘Include Subfolders’ box when importing in Lightroom once the culling has finished in Aftershoot.
4. Start building and testing the workflow one step at a time. You only need a handful of photos to test it which makes the process a lot faster.
5. Enjoy! This is a learning experience for creating your own automations. Think about what else you do that is always the same procedure but which takes time and that you’d love to create an automation for.
6. If you want to ingest multiple cards, use multiple card readers so you can ingest them all at once.