Data Asset Management- What the hell is that?
Well, all of us are slaves to the digital revolution. We shoot on high-end large MP cameras that spit out frames at 9 frames a second or more. Now if you shoot like I do, I don't turn on the camera for 5 min without shooting off a few hundred frames. You can imagine the kind of pileup that we all have on our hands - GB after GB after GB just filling up the hard drives.
So come tomorrow, you get a call from an agency that they are looking for a portrait of an old man with wrinkles with the sun in the frame. Now I know you might remember all your photographs at present, but 5 years down the road no way you will be able to keep track. Enter Asset Management. The internet is flooded with articles and softwares that will help you with the crazy task of reigning in those million of millions of bytes. Seriously, you might not think you need to do this right now- but its a good habit to get into.
How does it work?
Well you need to create a work flow that is typical to the work you are doing. For example, I shoot a lot of stock - i travel with my family or friends and i just shoot whatever comes to me as I see it. You have a closeup of a lock, right after a portrait of a child, and a shot of a garbage can. The temptation is to just drop it into a folder - lets say you name it Ooty 2007. Great! Its nicely stored away. Wrong! Yes its sitting pretty in the folder, but 6 months later when you need to dig up all your photos of locks - you begin to dig - and we all know how annoying that can be.
If your like me, you have crazy amounts of backlog. I am talking 300 GB of photos of god only knows what. Landscapes, Panoramas, HDR's all over the place. Ive started by first deleting anything that I wont be using, blank frames, wrong exposure, no focus - no point collecting junk - my goal is to ensure that only unique frames are retained - no duplicates. The best way to go about this sorting process is to go via Adobe Bridge CS3 - for one, its damn fast and it has all the features you will need.
Step One: Selecting images with the star systemSo lets say you start with your first LLA assignment, you open the folder in Bridge. I highly reccomend the Bridge starring system - 1 through 5 stars. A quick Apple + (numbers 1-5) will tag the image with its rating. So you can even make many levels of selection like i do - you start at 1 and go through quickly starring anything that looks half-good. If you look at the 'Filters' panel on the left part of the screen, you can then choose to look at only items with any level of stars. Quite often, you need to go back and take a look at your first round selects and weed out some duplicates - you can do this quite simply by tagging an image back to zero stars (Apple + 0). When your satisfied with the final images you have selected you are ready for the next step.
Step Two: Moving files to a master Photo folder.
This is the hardest part really figure how to organize your folders. I use the following structure.
---MAIN PHOTO FOLDER---
---------------Collections & Edits (anything you have compiled from a bunch of images
---------------------Faces of India (example collection)
----------------------------Hi-Res
----------------------------Low-Res
----------------------------Presentation (can contain slideshows, multi-medias or websites)
---------------Personal photos (all those wide-angle shots of your friends backside)
-----------------------Ooty College 2007 (these personal shots I usually batch process to JPEG and only save those - deleting any hi-res files)
-----------------------New Years 2008
---------------Work
------------------------Commercial <--- these folder contain a Hi-Res & Low-Res subfolder which contain broken up categories --------------------------------Product --------------------------------Fashion ------------------------Landscapes -----------------------------Ooty ---------------------------------2006 ---------------------------------2007 ------------------------Portraits ----------------------------------2006 ----------------------------------2007 -----------------------Macro ----------------------------Flora ----------------------------Fauna ----------------------------Stuff -----------------------Photojournalism ----------------------------Wooster Nagar -------------------------------------2007 ----------------------------Free-Tibet ------------------------------------2008 ------------------------------------2001
So remember all those files you selected in Step 1 - you have to move them into the appropriate folder in your Main Photo Folder. Remember, you want to try to select the portraits and drop them into your portraits folder, select the landscapes and do the same, etc. Then go back to the folder where you were selecting from and just delete the whole folder so you wont be collecting anything unnecessary.
Step 3: Cataloging - It will take you some time to complete Step 1 & 2 for all your images - but believe me it will be worth the effort. At the end of that part you might feel you are done. All your photos are neatly put away in the right place. Wrong! again. The folder system is great when it comes to organizing your storage - however it has some disadvantages. For one, when you want to find something specific, like a photograph of a child with an umbrella - the folders wont really help - unless you remember on exactly which date and which place you took a shot that matches the requirements - for arguments sake lets say you know that you do have a shot like that but cannot remember where the hell it is. Here is where you need an efficient library system thats lets you look at images from all over your neat folders, and of course an efficient metadata tagging system. There are a few high-end options available to us in the market. They are: Photoshop Lightroom, Apple Apperture & Extensis Portfolio. Ive done all the research into the pros and cons of all of them, but in the end its a personal choice of what you want from your library software and what your workflow will be like.
Extensis Portfolio 8 is the most hardcore of the cataloging systems avaiable. One can perfectly customize it to match even the strangest paterns that you can make up in your head. It supports a starring system, you can make groups, easy collections, view images in full screen, make web pages and slideshows and everything else you would expect from it. The one thing it does not do is let you do basic editing on the images. That is where the competitors have a one-up at least in my opinion.
Apple Apperture, is quite realistcially too damn memory intesnive - unless your running a pimp iMac or G5 on 8 gigs of ram - dont bother. It features a nice clean interface, and even lets you do a lot of basic editing (curves, saturation etc.) Where it lacks out for me is the lack of integration with photoshop - which is where I eventually take a lot of my shots. But the principal behind this software is that when you shoot high volumes, you want to slap some basic changes over a bunch of images, export them to tiff and just burn them onto a cd or make a web page - Apperture can do all that. However, i dont have that pimp computer to make this baby fly - so i settled for the next option.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.31 (only get this latest version) is a slick library setup that could easily become your workflow solution. I have been running some tests, and it has a cool feature that lets you import a set of images from a folder (or CF card), renames them with any format you can custom create and even seperates the images imported into folders that match the date it was shot. So my latest import of some old images from Ooty got sorted in a folder 2006 - inside which are images sorted by the precise date - this is what it looks like - Portraits>Ooty>2006>Oct 16>wowphoto.nef. What lightroom also does is slap on basic metadata (photographers name, copyrights, email etc.) via a customizable metadata template. Thats just the import. Like Bridge, Lightroom uses the Adobe star system - so you have compatibility accross the board - it also syncs with Photoshop perfectly. In addition to all this good stuff, you can do a whole lot of basic editing, curves, levels the works. Lightroom is basically a hardcore RAW processing engine - completely non-destructive - so any changes you make will not affect the actual RAW file. When i bring in a CF card full of some random images of tamil film posters, i dont want to have to even open photoshop - i makes some changes quickly under the 'Develop' panel in Lightroom and bam export them to Tiff's as well as jpeg's. Come on say it, your impressed.
So lets say you pick Lightroom to do your cataloging. The interface is really easy to use and you will get fluent very quickly. The key to use it efficiently is to learn the keyboard shortcuts. You can then rate items (star) - label them 'To Do' (so you know you have to work on them) - or add keywords that make the photo searchable. You can create groups of keywords - so the word 'nature' can also add beauty, natural, earth, life .... and you can slap on this custom keywords with an easy keyboard shortcut. Of course, you wont have to do every photo like this, slap your keywords onto a whole folder if you like. The goal being to later make it possible to dig up the photo of the kid with an umbrella by just searching by keyword.
Ok, thats enough for now. Let this be the first part of this article. If people are indeed reading this (send me a comment). I will go into further detail and finish.
I hope this helps make the picture clearer, feel free to hit me an email at fstop.blog@gmail.com with any questions.
Peace in the middle-east
All I'm saying is, 'just put it in f11 and just go for it.'
Varun G
