My metajob

I am in Ohio for the week, on a photo shoot. At my dinner meeting with John, my client at Wooster College, it dawned on me. I’m not delivering photography. I’m delivering a database. The only way that my clients are going to be able to use my work is if they know what it is. It means that, equally important with the quality of the image, is the quality of the data about that image.

The college is in the same boat with their photography archive as everyone else is. Meaning, up a creek without an oar. "It’s all in the head of our staff photographer," John said when I asked about how they manage their files. Oh, it’s that metadata method. The one we all use, until it’s all too much. The digital workflow has brought this problem to a head.

I demonstrated how I use Iview Media Pro to John. He thinks it’s the one his photographer is investigating. Adding keywords and catagories to images is relatively painless in this program, you can use multiple search criteria, and the data can be written to the IPTC fields in the image file. This information is then accessible by any image database program. The metadata I add to my images might be the most valuable part of what I deliver.

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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060418-6627.html