Eliminate the "Process Images" Step in FTP Upload
Eliminate the "Process Images" Step in FTP Upload (or create an auto-process option?):
Here's why:
The goal for a busy studio like ours is to eliminate as many unnecessary and repetitive tasks as possible. When I go to bed at night during the busy season, I often start 2, 3, 4, 5 uploads simultaneously so that the computer and internet are working for me overnight while I'm resting my photo editing-brain. As soon as I get up the next morning, I need to "Process" the images that have already been uploaded overnight. This might take up to an hour or so to complete. So in the meantime, I can't actually send out my instaproofs-generated "images online!" notification. So instead of sending that out immediately and clearing it from my to-do list, I have to move on to other projects, and then come back to instaproofs and monitor the "process" of the images. Big time suck. Would be nice if it was done automatically upon completion of upload. I can't seem to find a benefit to doing it manually. Never have I thought, "oh boy.. it would be nice to go back and be able to manually start the process" - as far as I'm concerned, I've "started" this process by starting the upload!
Or perhaps there can be a delay built in, where I set an automatic time for all images to be uploaded - for example, at 7:00am - an hour before I'm going to sit down and send out my notifications to clients that their images are online.
Thanks for the detailed suggestion, Joe. There are tradeoffs and benefits for each of the different upload options, and with FTP the downside is that you need to go back and manually start the process. The primary reasons for this are that we do not know when you are uploading the files or when you are going to be finished uploading the files, or whether you are going to be changing the category names in the FTP area before processing the files in, etc. Also, to make this an automatic process we would need to continually monitor every single event folder (and their subfolders) on the FTP server, for every user. This includes hundreds of thousands of folders, and would not be practical. However, the other upload options (such as the Lightroom uploader, our custom image uploader (PCs only), and the web uploader) do not require you to manually start the images processing, and one of them may work better for your situation. There are trade-offs for using the other upload options though, and you would need to weigh the tradeoffs and benefits of each option for your particular studio.