Been awhile since I’ve made any blog entries. I have lots of good ideas; I even have plenty of good pictures and some videos. What I don’t have is time – this year has been especially hectic. Furthermore, much of my free time has been taken up by my ongoing attempt to organize all my digital photos and videos into something that makes sense. Hence, this entry has nothing particular to do with Taiwan, but is just an FYI for any blogger/photographer out there.
I’ve been shooting digital for almost 5 years now. In that time, I’ve amassed quite a collection of photos and videos. Previously, I would organize these photos into folders, so that if I had 200 pictures from a trip to Taipei, it might look like any of the following on my computer directory:
My Documents\My Pictures\Taiwan\Taipei Trip\IMG_0001.jpg
My Documents\My Pictures|Trips\Taipei May 2008\IMG_0001.jpg
My Documents\My Pictures\Taiwan\2008\Taipei\IMG_0001.jpg
In short, it was willy-nilly and not very organized. I had to rely on visual recognition in Picasa or a similar program, plus my own memory of how I categorized that set of photos. While this may work for a few thousand photos, it won’t work for 10,000+ photos or larger collections (and my collection isn’t getting any smaller.
Enter one of the best books I’ve read on this subject: The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers by Peter Krogh. Simply put, it is an indespensible guide for any photographer, amateur or professional, as it lays down the framework for organization of all digital assets.
Basically, it runs like this: Shoot some picturs. Import them into your computer. Use a good program (Adobe Bridge or Adobe Lightroom are both excellent) to rename them (discussed later), assign metadata (Copyright notice, etc), and keywords (Essential for searching for pictures later on). Then, archive them with a good program (Adobe Lightroom is OK for this, iView Media Pro or Microsoft Expression is even better) and back them up to DVDs. I’ll do my best to break this down.
1. Naming
Peter suggests a naming structure that includes a beginning identifier (3 letters of your initials work well), the date (in a YYMMDD format), and an ending string (Preferably something unique, like the unique filename/serial number of the photo. So, what was before IMG_0001.jpg would become EXP_080518_0234.jpg. Looks confusing at first, but we aren’t quite done yet, so don’t give up on it so quickly. First, the EXP and the date ensure that everything stays organized. This photo was shot on May 18th, 2008. The unique identifier makes sure subsequent photos from the same shoot/day stay organized.
“But,” you say, “I don’t know what EXP_080518_0234.jpg means! Wouldn’t it be better to name it Picture_of_Taipei_101-5.jpg?” If that’s what works for you, so be it. But it doesn’t keep anything particularly organized. Again, this leads to a system that relies on visual recognition of both the picture thumbnail and the filename. Not particularly fast or helpful. Let me finish explaining the DAM process and then you can judge.
2. Assign Metadata
This is optional, but good practice. Each of the pictures I shoots gets a copyright notice that it belongs to me. If it goes up on the web, it has my name and my copyright on it. I don’t want anybody reproducing it. Good practice for amateur and professional photographers.
3. Assign Keywords
Bridge and Lightroom are both great at this. If it’s a picture of me in Taipei 101, I would assign something like the following keywords: Taipei, Taipei 101, Taiwan, Expatriate. That would probably be enough. I could get more specific depending on the photo. These keywords are written to metadata within the picture, so other programs can pick them out later and help you organize, which I’ll get to now.
4. Archive
Peter Krogh recommends a Bucket System. Basically, you make a folder to be your bucket. The first one would be RAW_001_080515. This says that this “bucket”/folder contains RAW files (originals, not .crw/.cr2/other camera raw files. But if you shoot in RAW, then yes, they would.) That means originals. These are your original .jpg and .crw files or whatever you shoot in. They are untouched (unless you do RAW processing). We also know that this is bucket 001, which helps keep the buckets organized. Furthermore, we can tell that the last picture added to this bucket had a date of 080515. Every picture in the bucket came before that date.
Inside the bucket, you would have more folders. For my Taipei trip, I might have a folder named 080515_Taipei_Trip. The date tells me when the last picture of the set was taken (and keeps things organized) and the name gives me a little info to help me should I need to find something manually (read: without software).
Once in the archive, you can fire up your archving software (again, Adobe Lightroom is OK, Microsoft Expression is better) and import the photos. If you have done the metadata step before, you will now have a nice list of keywords to help you find photos. Let’s say you have 25,000 Random Photos.. they are spread across buckets, in folders, neatly organized. You could load Picasa and scroll through them, looking for the one you want. You could even do it manually, going to My Pictures and searching each folder, looking at the thumbnails in Windows Explorer. Or, lets say I want all pictures of myself in Taipei 101. I would load my software, narrow my search by selecing the keywords “Exptatriate” and “Taipei 101” and see what pops up. Maybe 1 photo, maybe 200. I could narrow it even further by date (again, 1 more click). Thus, in 3 easy clicks, I have found all the photos I really want to find without looking through several folders, scrolling through Picasa, or doing anything else. Makes things much easier.
Finally, when your bucket (RAW_001_080515) reaches the right size, you burn it as a backup. So.. once it gets to be about 4.3 gb you can burn it to a DVD or 700mb you can burn it to a CD. Now you have a copy on your computer and, just in case something goes wrong, you have a copy backed up. It’s really quite a wonderful system.
Of course, Peter goes into much more detail in his book, include setting up Metadata templates, keywording, assigning labels and ratings in Bridge, and much, much more. I can’t begin to cover it all here. Suffice it to say that, even though the book is a bit dated (it focuses on Adobe Bridge and many photographers are moving to Adobe Lightroom for post-processing work), the techniques and philosophy it provides pay for themselves, especially if you are just starting out. If, like me, you already have a huge collection of semi-organized photos, it’s a nightmare to start from scratch, go into all the old photos, and follow the procedure. I’m slowly making my way through, though. Just today, I finished implementing this process on all my old videos and will continue working on my picture archive until it’s all done.
In short, for any blogger or photographer out there who loves to shoot pictures and needs a great (unfortunately not cheap) system for organizing them, I can’t recommend this book enough. It will definitely change the way you think about digital asset management.
EDIT: I forgot. If you want to know more, you can stop by The DAM Forum and learn a bit before buying the book.
Leave a Reply