Gone are the days of the neighbourhood photo studio where you would drop that roll of film you just shot, and ask 'uncle' to process it so you could pick up the prints the next day.

With digital photography, the photographer is one and the same - shutterbug and photo processor.

The good thing is you do not pass quality control of your photos to the lab.

On the flipside, today's digital photographer is likely to spend as much time - if not more - behind the computer as behind the lens in post-processing work. Everything from editing to archiving.

Here's the right workflow to keep your photos in order.

1. Download the photos



Sending the images stored on your camera to the PC creates a copy of the shots taken so that you can now view, edit and archive them on screen.

You can zip the photos across in two ways: via a direct cable-connection between the camera and the computer or by slotting a memory card into the PC's slot-reader.

I recommend the second method - it's faster and does not expend the camera's battery.

2. Trim the selection



Next, go through the downloaded photos, and trash the mediocre and bad shots. Images of people with closed eyes, out of focus subjects, and fingers blocking the lens - junk them.

Some photographic accidents might pass for art, but most of them have no place on your hard disk. Delete them and save some disk space.

3. Organise them



People tend to take a lot more snaps with a digicam than you would with film cameras.

But just as you took the time to organise prints into different albums, do the same for digital photos.

Instead of dumping all your photos into a single folder, categorise them into different folders, organised by events. Say, the Paris honeymoon, Ryan's birthday party, Lisa's graduation ceremony.

Taking it further, you might use a cataloguing program - from the basic Picasa to advanced programs like iView Media - to tag your photos with information such as keywords and star ratings.

These can be used later as search terms when you want to seek out certain photos.

4. Spruce up



Basic edits include adjusting the brightness, contrast and colour balance, and cropping to zero in on the subject and trim off the unwanted background.

If you are sharing the photos over web galleries or blogs, you also need to resize the photos to reduce their download size.

It's a good habit to save edits to a separate file, instead of overwriting the original.

This way, if you make a mistake, it's still possible to restart from the original, which remains intact.

Also, try to use a consistent file-naming convention.

For instance, add a suffix to the original filename to create 'DSC0001_edited', 'IMG1234_web' to differentiate edits from the originals.

5. Archive and back up



The rule-of-thumb is to have at least two copies of everything - just in case one goes awry.

It's also a good idea to use different media for the backup - say, put one set of images on the hard drive and another set of the same pictures on a CD-ROM. Or, rather than using just DVD media from a single spindle, burn the second copy to media from another brand.

This way, should one type fail, you have the backup set on the other one to turn to.