Managing and archiving Photo's

[Scott_Witcher]

I'm trying to come up with the best way for me to manage and store/archive my photo's. So far I have been using a folder structure which is fine for now but, I fear that if I wait until the portfolio development class in my final year, I will have gotten far too disorganized with my school, work, and personal photo's that it will be near impossible to pick up the pieces.

This past term I have been using Bridge to help with naming and organizing files but I'm unsure if it's a good long term solution. I have just downloaded Apple's Aperture and I do like it's storage and managment features, but I do not want to put everything into aperture because it's a 30 day demo and if I don't buy it I'll have to take everything back out.

What do you pro's do for managing and archiving your images? Help me please to keep myself organized.

[Josh_Hawkins]

I'll tell you both what I do, and things I'd like to improve in my process. I keep, by necissity, my entire schedule in my palm pilot. I can use that info to track what day I did any job. When I download my images they get automatically put into a folder with the date of the download on it and the files get renamed with date and time of exposure. This way as long as I know when I took a picture I can go back and find a picture. Also, my keepers get captioned through Photomechanic. Ideally I'd like to add Extensis Portfolio to automatically pull the caption info so I can search for captions, but haven't done it yet. All my raws get burned to two dvds, one set gets stored off site. Soon I'll have to start migrating my early digital work from CD to new DVDs or HD-DVDs

Best suggestions I can give you are organize up front even if it takes time because it will save you more time in long run. As for a simple set-up, Photomechanic to caption and rename, plus Portfolio for searching and management.

Hope that helps a little.

[David_Buzzard]

iView Media Pro is what you need. I think it's about a $200.00 download. It will create a searchable catalog of your files. Widely used and dependable.

David Buzzard's Technical Blog

[Marc_Schoenholz]

The world of Digital Asset Management will look significantly different in 12 to 18 months with the introduction of Light Room, MicroSoft's Expression Management (Iview), and others, including curently available Aperture.

I use two tools to effectively manage my photos.

1. Photo Mechanic is an effective and efficient tool for sorting, applying IPTC stationery, and creating custom configuarations

2. IView Media Pro 3 is one of the best tools for cataloging files

Following is a link to an article from Luminous Landscape on Image Asset Management that describes a straight forward work process.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/asset-management.shtml

These tools currently make DAM a much easier and straight forward process to implement. I hope that you find this information helpful.

Marc

[Scott_Witcher]

Thank-you for your replies!

I'll look into iView Media Pro and Photo Mechanic over the holidays.