I haven’t figured out how to do things after taking photos and I’ve done something different and complicated every time because I don’t really know how to do it...so I have some specific questions that I would love to get help on! Please keep in mind that “post processing” was just the only flair that was somewhat fitting. No need to get into how post processing is different from my questions. I am also a beginner who just needs to know the answer about these specific things about the general process after taking photos at an event (I think I explain it well enough).

So after I take photos at an event, I edit on Lightroom. Should I upload my photos from the SD card onto my computer desktop or documents or some other place before uploading them onto Lightroom? Or should I just immediately upload the photos from my SD card onto Lightroom?

Once I’m in Lightroom, I do NOT edit all the photos. I select only the good ones and put them into a folder to edit. After I’m done editing my photos, I want to have a watermarked version and an unwatermarked version of them all (because the watermarked ones will be put onto my link for people to access). But my question is, when I am exporting these images from Lightroom, where do I save them to? My desktop, my documents, photos app, or some other area on my computer? (Oh and also I use the watermark option while exporting from lightroom to add my watermark.)

The watermarked photos will then be uploaded onto my google drive because I can’t afford to use smugmug. I don’t put any unwatermarked photos onto google drive because then people will have access to it.

So now another question is, i should be able to delete the watermarked photos from wherever i saved them to first since I have them in my google drive, right?

And another question is, should I keep RAW images of the photos I selected to be edited (because I wouldn’t want to keep every single RAW IMAGE I TOOK ON THE SD CARD), and if so, how? And where? This question affects and is related back to the very first step because if I upload straight from the SD card into Lightroom, I won’t have any of the raw photos on my computer. So should I export all the photos onto my desktop/documents/(where?) and then select the ones i want to keep and put them into another folder in the same location of my computer BEFORE I upload onto Lightroom for editing?

Thats all my questions! I know other student photographers use smugmug to hold all their photos, both watermarked and unwatermarked, but I cannot afford that which is why I have these specific questions about where to save them and stuff, etc.