I have been transferring gigabytes for weeks. It feels like a near Sisyphian task, moving mountains of data from one hard drive to another, while more pours out from the pipeline of my current shooting. I am still waiting for the day when this is a routine background task, and not the core of my working life.
Through my early months in digital, I vowed that I would make a clean start of my file organization. I failed. Or rather, I picked an organizational mode that didn’t work. File names that referenced content. A file heirarchy that stressed sequence above anything else. As I have jobs that span across several months of shooting, I ended up using the least reliable metadata system for finding stuff—my head.
About 6 weeks ago I got Peter Krogh’s book, The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers. It changed everything for me. Two weeks ago I attended an evening presentation by him, put on by our ASMP chapter.
My 600 gigabytes of RAW files are converted to DNG format and stored in a separate file server computer. So are about 180 gb of derivative files, all the tifs and psds and jpgs. I access it through a gigabit network, so the hard drives on it are as accessible and speedy as my local drives. During the transfer I suffered a major computer crash when I was downloading the data from one of my stored-on-the-shelf hard drives, which set me back about a week. This data transfer task is nearing completion. Everything I have ever shot digitally is immediately accessible now. I'm now making back-ups on hard drives that will live off-site.
I’m learning a new software program to manage all those files: Iview Media Pro. It is quickly becoming the cataloging program of choice for photographers. I wish to heck someone would write a book on how to use it. Peter devotes about half a chapter in The DAM Book to it (he says he’s working on the book I want). I downloaded and printed out the 144 page pdf manual, which is obtuse and in engineer-speak (is there a style sheet in circulation on how to make these things uniformly unintelligable?). I am making baby steps in figuring it out, and probably picking up inefficient habits I’ll have to break when I find out how I’m supposed to be doing it.
Here’s where I am so far. The most recent two months of work is imported, keyworded, and placed in catalog folders. It makes a nice analog to my current slide filing scheme, except that it doesn’t matter where the file itself lives. I make these catalog sets that point to the files. A given file can be in more than one catalog set, so I can have a given shot be in the "Portraits" file, or in the "Assignment: Rural Development Institute" file. I don’t know if my keywording scheme is the right way to go—it seems to be getting unwieldy.
Assignment work is in a lull at the moment, so I have the time to learn this stuff. It’s another steep pitch in the digital learning curve.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I've been feeling the creaking of my current data backup, etc., and am about to embark on a reorg, and having some more ideas for how to accomplish that is really quite appealing!
Posted by: Joe Decker | April 08, 2006 at 12:01 AM