For me it is not about time spent working, but your productivity rate; and for that reason I like to have an efficient workflow. One of those workflows is when I am editing a managing photos. I have what I think to be a very good way of managing and editing my photos in Aperture.
Organise
It is always good to organise your images, and the best way to do this is put them into a hierarchy, mine goes a bit like this.
In Aperture it looks a bit like this.
If your Library is organised it makes it much easier to find things and edit them.
Editing
After I have edited an image I rate it 1,2,3,4 or 5 stars; I would also add any meta data e.g. Keywords. Next I decide if it is Flickr worthy, if so it gets a Flickr tag added. This tag comes in handy when we get to my smart albums. These are contained in there own folder (Smart Folders). I have one for each lens followed by one for each camera body and finally one for any images tagged with Flickr. By tagging them I can see if I have already uploaded them or not, this makes life much easier.
Interesting to see your well structured approach – I must admit I am not as well organised as that. I certainly need to look more at smart albums and smart folders. Do the pictures go automatically into the smart folder for the right lens or do you have to tag the photos first?
Talking about work-flow, what do you do with editing the photos? Crop, straighten, levels, touch up, etc? What order do you work in? Do you complete one photo before moving on to the next? Do you edit much in Photoshop?
@Chris Leigh Yer the images go straight into the smart folders, but for Flickr the tag must be added. I don’t like to crop in software I prefer in the camera, First I correct the WB, Exposure, Contrast, Definition and Vibrance. I always finish editing one image before moving on and most of it is done in Aperture I only edit in Photoshop when I am creating a Panorama.