Most people tend to use Lightroom as their Swiss knife; it works great, it looks nice, it is like one stop service. Nonetheless I stick with Camera Raw & Bridgebfor a reason, no library. I prefer to organize things my way. This is how I process all raw file.

1. import by windows live photo; it works fantastic for me although it’s not the fastest, but I can management them to do exactly the way I want. Most of the time I group photos by period of time which live photo can adjust flexibly with single touch. Also, I can choose either leave folder name to be by auto number or my own, date YYYY-MM-DD format added automatically. For viewing, live photo is also the best all around IMO.
2. fire up Bridge and do all processing.
3. export to JPEG.
4. move JPEG to my server, //server/photos & move raw to //server/photos-raw
5. done.

the question later on is why do I have to separate raw and processed one. An easy answer is for usability. Most of the time when you have raw and JPEG all together. They are damn redundancy to watch or find whatever you want. Moreover, raw file is like 15MB each while each of JPEG is just a megabyte or so. It’s way faster to view and enjoy your work. I duplicate all raw and processed files for accidental sake.

This seems to be pretty solid procedure. If you are like me, try to understand things & never read help or manual. You might be in trouble. For me, it’s about dot xmp from Camera Raw. I hated all extra meaningless files like when you works with PC & Mac—PC’s thumb & Mac’s DS thingy. I always find the way to remove them all and of course, Camera Raw has an option for that called “Camera Raw Database.” For some reasons, I believed that Adobe would write this setting value in raw file’s header, instead of having dot xmp sitting next to raw one. I was deadly wrong.

Camera Raw basically stored all your tweaked setting into its database file located in %appdata%/adobe/cameraraw and surely these database are using file path and name to match. It’s faster and has no dot xmp junk in directory, but once you move the file, all tweaked setting values are trash. The way to save these settings is to export to dot xmp files. haha Thus you will have dot xmp along side your raw anyway, but you will never lose anything you’ve done. In case you’ve changed raw filename, please change that dot xmp name too.

As a result, I eventually lost all my adjustments for most of raw files, but from now on, my raw will sit besides dot xmp like a soulmate. poor me.