One day, totally at random, some guy asked me on the street if I’m am being available to cover an event that they organize. I am a hobby photographer and usually I shoot what I want, when I want, where I want, and I didn’t have experience with such things. But I accepted the challenge. It was a Cameroonian association dinner party, followed with many different activities with 100+ people present.

After I got timeline of the event and started planning everything, I realized that I might not be ‘enough’ to cover everything as I am not skilled enough. So I decided to call a friend for help. She accepted the invitation, we did quite nice job and the client was happy at the end.

But even though I tried to think about everything I didn’t think about how are we going to merge our photos after the shooting, and that gave me a small headache. When I copied all the photos (~2×500 photos) from our memory cards, I found out that I have a bunch of photos, with no pattern I can use to separate them. So I had to do it manually, and there was a lot of job, because that celebration included many different sections: red carpet, opening ceremony, prayer, dinner, drama, fashion show, etc. I lost maybe 15-30 minutes on sorting all the photos, and maybe it’s not too much, but I would be more happy if I didn’t have to.

Check these instructions (Sync Multiple Camera Time Stamps In Lightroom 4, Fix Timestamp Issues on Multi-Camera Shoots) if you’ve already did the same mistake.

So I was thinking what could I do to make it better next time, and realized that I can sort photos by the time they were taken. But there is a catch: for that you need to sync clock on your cameras that you are doing shooting with.

If you are using more cameras or if you are shooting with a friend, just take some time before and configure your clocks to show the same time. After that you can easily sort them by time on your computer.