Catalog your first job
Two ways to start a job, why the debrief is the better one, and how to pick the two hundred frames worth cataloging.
Updated Jul 27, 20266 min readApplies to 1.0.0
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 if you have connected it. Point us at a folder and go.
Or start with intake is one option: Send a debrief first. No photos yet. Just the couple, and a questionnaire on its way to them.
If you have a client who will fill out a form, the second one is the better choice, and it is worth waiting for.
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. It is written to do 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 is 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.
The debrief has the full picture: every section, how to change the questions, and where the answers turn up.
Choose Send a debrief first
NEW JOB, then Send a debrief first, under Or start with intake.
Name the client
Client names, and a date if you have one. Job type defaults to Wedding. Anything else lives behind Not a wedding? Change job type.
This creates a placeholder job. No folder, no frames, nothing to catalog yet.
Send it
The Send Debrief sheet opens on its own with the subject and message already written and a link generated. Edit the copy if you want. Then either Copy the link into whatever you email from, or press Open in Mail.
The questions sit below the email fields. Change anything you want to change before you send, because sending locks the debrief so the couple cannot have it shift under them mid-answer.
Wait
The job card reads Debrief Sent. 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 will not have a debrief. Old work, a couple who will not 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. Two hundred characters is roughly where it starts pulling weight in the writing.
Reference documents takes a drop. PDF, DOC, TXT, images. A planner's timeline or a design deck is the usual one. We pull the text out and read it.
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 is what your own Claude key is for.
Catalog it
Attach the folder
For a new job, NEW JOB then From computer or From Dropbox. For a job that started as a debrief, open it and use Add Images.
One folder, one job. les Archives does not scan a parent folder and pull in everything under it, so point it at the job itself, not at the year.
Fill in what you know
Couple names, venue, location, date. We copy these straight through, so they are only as right as you type them. Then About this job, if you have not already.
Press Start Cataloging
It is on the job’s panel. If you stopped partway through before, the same button reads Resume Cataloging and picks up where it left off.
Leave it running
This is not a coffee break. We send your frames to Claude a few at a time and wait twenty seconds between batches, three frames per batch on included credits and five with your own key. Two hundred frames runs for something like an hour and a half. Start it and go do something else.
We checkpoint after every batch, so quitting mid-run loses nothing. The 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 have 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.
Do not 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 are 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. Settings shows where you stand.
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