10,000 Images – Organizing Images With Digital Asset Management

Introduction

The first project I am going to work on involves photographs I have taken on the French island of Corsica. I have about 10,000 photographs to chose from. This is just an estimate of course but when you consider that I’ve been to Corsica every year for 20+ years and about half of those years I had a digital camera, it’s probably a good estimate for just the digital image count.

So where does one start? How does one organize such a large number of digital photographs? What is the culling process? How are images selected, and what is my post processing workflow?

These are the things I want to address in the next few articles. Today, I am going to discuss Ingestion. Yes, ingestion can give you indigestion just thinking about it because it is not a visual process; at least not all of it. Most of it has to do with, dare I say it; words—yuck! Don’t throw-up those vowels just yet, we need to get the photos onto the hard drive first so dig-up your detective spyglass from the kitchen drawer that has “everything” in it and start hunting for your photos.

Ingestion

The first step I made was to copy all my images off of the DVDs and CDs I had made over the years. I purchased a hard drive just for housing these files or as they are called in the Digital Asset Management world; assets. Each years’ assets (video or stills) were placed into their own folder. I ended up with about 9 folders starting with 2003 and ending with 2012. It’s not really over, since I plan to return again in the future.

Ingesting digital files is sort of like filling a crate with a stack of books in that you create information about each asset at several levels.

What do you think we could equate this process to?

How about we equate this process to a bunch of wooden crates containing books? Each crate represents a particular year and inside of each crate are all the books that were published that year or in my case, all the photos I shot that year.

So what do we know about my mass of images? We know that I have about 10 of these “crates” but that number will grow in the future. That, unfortunately, is all we know about them so far. Let’s call this group a Library or perhaps it is better labeled; the start of a DAM (Digital Asset Management). This library contains lots of photographic files that we will call assets. Since they are “digital” we’ll call them more appropriately; digital assets. Now we have to figure out how to manage them.

Moving all these files from external media took quite some time because I had to sort out duplicate files so they weren’t double-ingested and I had to make sure I found all of the files I’ve shot. For the most part, I have always back up my photographs but I needed to make sure I didn’t put any on discs that might have been used for other purposes besides just photography.

To move the files, I inserted the disc into my computer and used Adobe Bridge to convert the RAW NEF (Nikon Electronic Format) files into Adobe DNG (Digital Negative) files. I did not change any of the file names of the DNGs. I left them just as they came off the camera. I suppose I could have named the files by the year and other relevant information but since they were just, assets, at this point I decided to leave them with the native file name.

For this ingestion process (the importing of the RAW files into my hard drive), I could have added additional meta data to each file at the time of import but I didn’t. Since this was my first experience organizing this many images (assets), I wanted to figure out what meta data I needed to enter and then add it after the import.

In my next post, I will discuss what meta data I figured out I needed to add. For now, I’m happy with my 10 or so dated “crates” that each contain a collection of books from that year.

Continue to next post: 10,000 Images – Meta Data

LINKS OF INTEREST

The following websites and books can provide some very important information on what a DAM is and how you can implement one on an enterprise or individual photographers level.

DP Best Flow (Excellent resource on DAM and all things workflow related)
The DAM Book by Peter Krogh (DAM for Photographyers)
Henrik de Gyor’s Another DAM Blog (enterprise level)