Catalog your first job

Cataloging is where les Archives earns its keep. It reads a folder of frames and writes what it can about each one, so the whole archive becomes searchable and everything downstream, carousels, pins, submissions, has something to work with.

How good that writing is depends almost entirely on what we know about the wedding before we start. Which is what the NEW JOB menu is really asking you.

Two ways to start a job

Open NEW JOB and you get two sections.

Start a new job now is the fast path. From computer, or From Dropbox once you've connected it. Point us at a folder and go.

Or start with intake is where you begin before the photos exist. Two options sit there.

• Send the couple their debrief. No folder yet. Just the couple, and a questionnaire on its way to them. This is the one this article is about.
• Fill in the debrief myself. The same form, opened in your own browser. The answer for old work, and for couples who will never fill out a questionnaire.

If you have a client who will fill out a form, that's the better start, and it's worth waiting for.

The debrief has its own reference article covering both paths in full.

Why the debrief is worth it

The debrief is a questionnaire you send to your couple. Fourteen sections, from how they met through what they wore through who to credit. The form does two jobs at once.

The first is captions. A caption that names the bar where they met, or the song that played for the first dance, reads like it came from someone who was there. Without that, we can only write from what's in the frame.

The second is submissions. Editors ask for the same things every time: the proposal, the reason for the venue, the full vendor list, what the dress was and who made it. The debrief asks for all of it in the couple's own words, so the job is submission ready before you ever open the Share tab.

Sending it

1. Choose Send the couple their debrief. NEW JOB, then that option, under Or start with intake.
2. Name the client. Client names, and a date if you have one. Job type defaults to Wedding, and anything else lives behind Not a wedding? Change job type. This creates a placeholder job. No folder, no frames, nothing to catalog yet.
3. Send it. The Send Debrief sheet opens on its own with the subject and message already written and the link already generated. Edit the copy if you want. Then press Open in Mail, or use Copy to take the link into whatever you email from.
4. Wait. The couple can save and come back, and most take it in two or three sittings. When they finalize, the card flips to Awaiting Photos, the Dashboard counts it, and the job grows a client debrief tile you can open and read.

Or write the context yourself

Plenty of jobs won't have a debrief. Old work, a couple who won't fill out a form, a shoot that was never a wedding. You can still tell us about it.

Open the job and look at the working file on the right.

About this job is the fastest thing you can do and it does the most work. Type what you remember. The vendors, the weather, the thing that happened at the reception, why the venue mattered.

Reference Documents takes a drop. PDF, DOCX, DOC, TXT, and MD.

Relevant Links takes a published feature, a planner blog, a wedding website.

Choose the right 200 frames

Not the delivered gallery. Not everything you shot.

Catalog the frames you would actually pin, post, or submit. Your selects. The ones that would go in a carousel or in front of an editor. Up to about two hundred of them from one job.

If you want no cap, that's what your own Claude key is for.

Catalog it

1. Attach the folder. For a brand new job, NEW JOB then From computer or From Dropbox. For a job that started as a debrief, open it and press ATTACH PHOTOS FOLDER, then choose where the photos are. One folder, one job. les Archives doesn't scan a parent folder and pull in everything under it, so point it at the job itself, not at the year.
2. Fill in what you know. Couple names, venue, location, date. We copy these straight through, so they're only as right as you type them. Then About this job, if you haven't already.
3. Press Start Cataloging. It's on the job's panel. If you stopped partway through before, the same button reads Resume Cataloging and picks up where it left off.
4. Leave it running. Cataloging runs in the background. We send your frames to Claude a few at a time and pause between batches, three frames per batch on included credits and your configured batch size with your own key. Start it and go do something else. We checkpoint after every batch, so quitting mid-run loses nothing. A job filling in gradually is a run still going, not a run that failed.

Reading the progress numbers

The counter reads cataloged over found. The first number is frames we've written rows for, the second is how many we saw in the folder. They start far apart and close as it works.

What to check when it finishes

Open the job and look at twenty frames. Check the event phase, the color palette, and the time of day. Those three are what we work out from the image itself, and everything downstream is built on them.

Don't judge us on the venue name or the couple's names. We copy those straight from what you typed when you set the job up, so getting them right proves nothing.

If the phase or the palette are consistently wrong, say so in the room before you catalog another twenty jobs against the same settings.

If you hit the cap

We check before we start, so if you're already at your limit we refuse the job rather than half doing it. If you cross the limit mid-run we stop there and tell you what got through. Chapter 01 in Settings shows where you stand, on the MONTHLY USAGE row.

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