Keywording for Public Consumption

[Anthony Millan]

Hello,

My name is Anthony Millan. I am a semi-professional photographer (as in I don't have enough bread and butter work to go at it full time yet) residing in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Your book has been unbelievably helpful to me in setting up a "proper" DAM workflow as I had previously gone about it the entirely wrong way. i.e. setting up folders/files via category or client. After having crashed and burned with many other trial versions of different DAM software I finally settled on iView and LOVE it! As you have previously mentioned - I also believe it to be the best program currently available for DAM.
I do have some minor questions (after having read and re-read your book many times) that you can possibly help me out with. I have spent countless hours on the forum reading previous posts and currently continue to frequent the forum and both your websites for current information. I realize how busy you are, and am grateful for any time that you may have available to spend answering my questions.

Regarding Keywords:
1. What is your particular method/process for entering keywords into bridge or iView especially if they are for stock imagery or imagery for public consumption? i.e.is it via a CV from controlledvocabulary.com, is it a professional keywording company, is it keywording software, or do you simply create your own hierarchical vocabulary? If you create your own CV what works for you when it comes to creating its hierarchy? I'm having difficulty standardizing.
2. I'm currently having trouble with keeping my focus or am perhaps getting too carried away when it comes to keywording images. How many keywords are acceptable and how many are too much? I realize that many stock agencies have their own specifications in terms of how many keywords are useable/searchable, etc. I know you have mentioned that the majority of your keywording is for private use only. what dictates what you embed back into the image?
3. If a keyword can go into any of the IPTC fields, i.e IPTC Location: "Grand Canyon", do you typically add these as keywords to the keyword field?

[peterkrogh]

Anthony,
Most of my keywording is for personal use, so I need relatively few keywords.  My stock agent has their own vocabulary, and keywording needs to be done through their tools.

Keywording can be dependent on the way that the agency works, and how they treat metadata.
Peter

[Anthony Millan]

Peter,

Would you still bother with embedding any keywords into the images themselves or would this be something that should strictly reside in your catalog/keyword sets in iView since it is mainly/only for personal use.

i.e. would you only embed keywords into the images on an as needed basis or for particular stock agency requirements?

Regards,
Anthony Millan

[peterkrogh]

Right.  Embed the data as KEywords because there is a reason to.  Making the information searchable is a good reason.
Making it visible to another application is also a good reason.
Peter

[Anthony Millan]

Wouldn't this defeat the whole purpose of keywording in Bridge then? even if it is only bulk keywording that is done, since bridge automatically embeds the information into the file/xmp? Or do you embed a few keywords, to begin with, in bridge just so that 1. you actually have some keywords embedded in order to follow the image to your cataloging software and 2. as a kind of "backup" so that if a catalog becomes corrupt you're not starting from scratch since it is already embedded into the file?

I'm going on the assumption that our naming sequences are something like "millan_yymmdd_9999.dng" and that there is no way, other than metadata or actually viewing the image, to know what the image is of.

I guess I'm a bit confused as to this workflow pipeline - i.e. this is where my workflow breaks down a bit - as I've downloaded the PDF of the workflow checklist and noticed that after "rename" comes "metadata" (I'm assuming this is strictly for IPTC data only - copyright info, labels, ratings, etc. but not keywords) and then at the end of the workflow there is "make sets" (which would be where you actually begin tagging the images with "keywords" - in quotations as these are actually catalog sets and not actually embedded keywords). This differs from the book workflow in that you had "keyword" after "c raw" in the workflow (whereby keywording was limited to strictly bulk entry because this is a bridge step) and "catalog" was the final step.

In other words couldn't one simply skip bridge altogether when it comes to any keywording of images and only rely on iView for this task. This would "limit" tasks in bridge for applying labels, ratings, copyrights, locations, c-raw settings, etc. (excluding any keywording).

I hope I'm not complicating this issue.

Regards,
Anthony Millan

[peterkrogh]

Anthony,
You're basically on target.  I annotate in bulk in Bridge because it is the easiest time to do this, and I want to make sure it's done.  Don't skip it - it's fast, and essential information to attach to the files.

Are you actually practicing this stuff, or just thinking about it?  I ask because your understanding seems pretty good, but many of these questions are answered once you start putting the practices into service.
Peter

[Anthony Millan]

Peter,

Thank you once again for your replies!
I have only recently began to put into practice the DAM workflow that you had mentioned from your book. I've been working through the pipeline as you had mentioned, but I feel that I was getting a bit too carried away with adding keywords from within bridge - Not so much as in custom keywording, but not necessarily completely "bulk" either. I've pretty much been selecting groups of images, (sometimes non-contiguous files) and have been keywording those within bridge. I've found this a bit slow, in terms of processing images in bridge and I suppose, was curious to know if this would better be done through iView via catalog sets and then sync'ed to the files. Basically, when you mean "bulk" in bridge are you referring to doing only that which you can do to "all" the files? Or are you referring to that which you can apply to "many" files at one time? (this is the source of my confusion on this subject)

As an example: I shoot some production stills for films and some of the behind the scenes shots involve people but not all of the shots have the same people in them. I've made "people" into a set consisting of "Director", "Cinematographer", "Grip", etc.  and then I go through the browser searching for and selecting all images with the "Director" in them and add the keyword. Is this going too far towards custom keywording within bridge? is there a better/faster way? (iview sets) Or is this roughly on target? (what you would define as bulk keywording) It clearly makes sense to add some keywords along with the other metadata early on. I'm all for doing it once or in other words "doing it right the first time!" I really hate back-tracking to fix mistakes or to refine a system.

Regards,
Anthony Millan

[danaltick]

Anthony,

Bulk metadata does refer to "all" the files in bulk.  It includes metadata such as contact info, copyright, location, common keywords, etc.  If you can do this at ingestion, it will save you even more time.  ImageIngesterPro is a great utility for this.  You can certainly do some custom keywording in Bridge, but it's typically faster to do this later using the catalog manager.  The catalog manager keeps that metadata private (i.e. stored in the catalog file) until you are ready to push it into the files for delivery purposes; therefore, it is much faster.  If I can't get to keywording my images immediately after archiving and cataloging them, I will place them in a Utility catalog set called "Needs Keywording" and keyword them as I can get to them.

Dan

[peterkrogh]

Anthony,
As Dan indicates, Bulk means many at once.
Do the granular work in iView.
Peter

[Anthony Millan]

Thanks Peter and Dan for your help, this makes much more sense now.

Anthony Millan

[David Mackie]

Anthony

If it is any help I add my bulk metadata (bulk keywords and iptc header information) right away in Bridge just after ingesting the images. I use ImageIngestor and the images are renamed on copying from the camera.

For example:
Creator information
Copyright information
Bulk keywords like: "Family Vacation", Mexico, Mazatlan, (I also put the location data in the IPTC headers), spring,...anything that is shoot wide.
Then I rank and label the images
Then I review the ranking just to make sure and delete any photos that should be deleted
Then I review the keywords and add people names, or things like landscape, portrait, sunset, - usually on 1star and higher ranked images
On 3star+ images I review the keywords again because these are ones I may want to find for more subtle keywords.

Then into ACR, then convert to DNG

David