Managing the Mess

  I’m in the "what do I do now" stage of overwhelm. There’s hundreds of pictures in a single file on my desktop. There’s converted tifs in scattered files in no particular order. I have done precisely what I vowed I would not do—start shooting before I have a scheme in place to manage my image database.

The first problem is deciding which photos to keep and which to pitch. Louping film is a whole lot faster—sharp, keep; soft, chuck. I can do a rough edit of a roll of film in seconds. Now I have to copy the files from a CF card, and wait, and wait, and then open up a program that gives me a bunch of little thumbnails that don’t tell me much, and I pick one, and wait until it’s loaded, and I enlarge, and enlarge, and then I have to look at the next one and enlarge and see which I like better, and remember which that was when I look at the thumbnails. It is truly a sucky way to judge images.

Then there’s this converting thing, as a RAW file is just that—uncooked. You can do and undo and redo and never make up your mind what the image truly should look like, but that’s only before you convert it to something that is further editable. And then there’s the matter of what to call it and where to store it.

My entire film archive is numbered in such a way as to tell me in which position in which slide page in which file in which cabinet I can find a given slide and, more importantly, where to put it back when I’m through. This positional notation is, theoretically, irrelevant in a digital format. Other kinds of search codes—keywords and the like—ought to accomplish the same thing. But that means establishing a framework NOW. Without knowing what makes sense yet. So I leave everything named with the camera codes, and nothing more. And watch the pile grow and metastasize.

And then I need to decide what program to use to manage this database. The file manager in CS is clunky, but so is everything else. I’ve got a demo version of Extensis Portfolio, which is completely unintuitive in layout, so I’ve printed out the PDF of a user’s manual (I HATE reading PDF’s on a screen), all 148 pages, to see if I can crack the code.

How do I learn how to do all this without bringing the rest of my life to a complete halt in the meantime?

Comments

[stephan]

You probably already know this but if you store your images in their RAW format with the default name the camera gave it you run the risk of loosing your images. Why/How? .. when or if you switch to another CF card the numbering will start back and one again and when you transfer them to your computer you will have two files with the same name. Seth Resnick who has much more credibility than I always recommends that you rename your raw files.