We are all very, very busy these days. We fill our time with work, friends, and family. Any spare time we fill with hobbies, TV, and of course the Internet. Many of these activities lead to consuming and generating copious amounts of digital content as I have mentioned before. It is the generating of so much digital content that is overwhelming to me. It leads to more time to manage the content. Which leads to less time to actually DO anything with the content.

Case in point…I take photos nearly every day. And generally not a snapshot or two but rather 20+ photos. The photos are captured with either my DSLR or iPhone. I rarely sync my iPhone photos to my Aperture library even though I now have a slick app for that, PhotoSync and I probably only download photos from the DSLR into Aperture once or twice a week. This means I rarely have a current, centralized photo library. However, that’s not really my concern. My concern is that there is little point to all the photo capturing if I am not going to do anything with them, right? So I should (at least) once a week be processing (deleting, keywording, rating, and photo editing) and doing something with the photos.

Fortunately the photo management software available today also offer spectacular photo editing tools so unless you really need to fix up a photo there is little reason (for me) to use software like Adobe Photoshop any more. Remember those days? I would spend a minimum of 15 minutes per photo and that’s only because I had created a ton of Photoshop Actions that made editing fast. Now, I spend about 15 seconds editing each photo using Aperture (Adobe Lightroom is equally capable; I own both). Even when they are as bad as the original photo below.

How is it possible to edit photos so fast? 90% of the time I simply use one of my favorite five presets¹, so with a click of a button I’m done. What’s really sad…I still can’t seem to make the time to do anything with my photos.