DAM: Where to begin on about 4 years worth of sports photography!

[PaulAbell]

Hey all...

I am a photographer that is looking to become better organized in 2007. For the last 4-5 years, I have not managed my digital library well, if at all. My photographs, other than the ones on the wire are on hard drives, DVD's and CD's. None are backed up off site, and I have no idea where any of my photos are. In the past, I played around with programs like Portfolio and Cumulus, but it took forever to catalog the files, and it caused me to loose interest.

Yesterday, I purchases the iView Media Pro from MS. Overall, in my initial tests, it seems much better, so I am hoping that this will do the trick.

Initially, I wanted to catalog my images by categories such as 2003 NFL, 2004 NFL, 2005, NFL, 2006 NFL in hopes that I would have a smaller number of catalogs per year. In my initial Test catalog, I imported about 500 basketball photos in DNG format that were converted in Adobe Raw Converter from the Canon RAW files. My catalog, after enlarging the thumbnails, was about 30MB. Given the size, I am curious what most of you are doing... Would it be best to have each event a catalog? I am worried that I will have hundreds of catalog files each year. At this point it seems quite a taks to keep up with...

Maybe I am missing something, but it would be nice to have all of the catalogs contained within 1 main file for the year. I suppose I could place all catalogs in a folder titled 2003 NFL, 2003 Arena Football, etc. I am very curious what you all are doing. Are you backing up your catalog files? I plan on using this system on my two Apple laptops—the one I shoot with and the one I keep in the office.

My structure might look like this:

2003:
> 2003 NFL: game1, game 2, game 3, etc...
> 2003 Arena Football: game 1, game 2, game 3, etc...
> 2003 NCAA Basketball: game 1, game 2, game 3, etc...
> 2003 MLB: game 1, game 2, game 3, etc...

Any suggestions... This system will also include commercial and architectural work, as well. I would appreciate any help that you all might provide... If you wish to take a look at my work, you may do so at AbellCreative.com.

Best,


Paul Abell

[johnbeardy]

Paul

"and I have no idea where any of my photos are"

Not sure what you mean here. Maybe you just mean a specific picture is in a folder, but you don't know which folder, somewhere within that hard drives, those CDs and DVDs. If so, that's less worrying. If not, the first task has to be to physically define where your pictures are. They're on these 4 drives, in these 5 folders, and in that pile of DVDs. You need to have that certainty about the overall layout.

A second thing to do is divide the problem. Most importantly, set up a catalogue for all new pictures (start with Jan 1, 2007) and establish a controlled workflow right now (like Peter I believe a bucket approach is best). Dealing with the archive isn't going to be the most pressing priority and can easily get shoved to one side, so by working properly every day on your current material you'll be learning the program and getting into the routines and disciplines. You'll be reaping the benefits and stopping any more chaos piling up.

For your existing archive, set up your initial catalogues so they match exactly the physical location of your pictures, not types of work. So make one or more catalogue of your hard drives, and another of the CDs and DVDs - not one for basketball, one for football, and certainly not one per project unless you want to have to catalogue your catalogues! Years might work, if they are matched by a 2003 drive or 2003 discs etc. Subjects can work - a friend has an opera drive, another for ballet etc and one or more catalogues for each. Metadata can look after the analysis - it can use EXIF to determine years for example, and you could have keywords for your sports, enter job numbers to identify projects. You need to be able to say these 10 catalogues contain all my work and it's on those drives and discs. Period. In other words, set up catalogue files to regain control of the physical space.

Concentrate first on getting all your stuff into iView catalogues, and then on analysing and adding metadata to help you find them. Let's say all your basketball images contain NBA in the filename - run an iView find on NBA in the filename, select all the records, keyword them with basketball, sports, professional, games, action etc. Same for NFL and so on - and work from the top down. For instance, let's say some of those filenames contain Green Bay (wherever that may be) - find files with NFL and Green Bay, add Green Bay as a keyword (assuming that is something you may need to search on). So you are using metadata, albeit in the filename, to make it easier to add more metadata. Eventually you may need to go visual, picking out those shots of Jordan and adding certain keywords - at some point it's not worth being able to identify Joe di Whatziznome. And you also get clever - let's say your folder names contain the names of the events or you had to enter minimal IPTC descriptions when you did the shoot - ask around for what scripts can do. (For instance a friend has tens of thousands of opera shots and time pressure meant the only metadata was the description, copied from the cast list - we've now got scripts that search through the whole data, look for a chosen soprano, and leave the script to add various keywords.)

Other points. Expect the catalogue files to be big - 30MB is nothing and I'd expect 1Gb for 20000 shots for instance. re backups, yes. I backup catalogues weekly and have a daily XML export. You can with job based catalogues but I think they're best kept as temporary stores. When I'm away from home, I'll often have a catalogue for the trip. Upon my return, File > Import from Catalog brings the trip pictures into my main file, and the Reset Paths command points iView to the files' permanent location.

Hope this helps.

John

[PaulAbell]

John:

This helps... I was worried about the fact that the catalog file might be too large. Maybe I am thinking of having to manage a 1GIG file in Photoshop. Are y ou cataloging RAW files, JPEG files or both?

When I said that I did not know where my files were, I meant that I have them, but that they are either on DVD or 1 of 4 fairly large harddrives. I have not spent the proper time to arrange these accordingly. Actually, my past photos are a major prioroity as I need to move some photos from one wire to another and add additional photos, etc... In the end, I will catalog all of my edited photos so that I will know what wire they are on, as well as a few other bits of important information.

As far as the IPTC fields go, all of my photos are ingested with a great deal of IPTC information already there. The only information that is not present at the time of ingest is the name of the players that are in the photos—the general caption. Those are added to my photo edits that are uploaded to Getty, US PRESSWIRE or WireImage. Even when shooting a commercial or editorial assignment, I still add the IPTC info. It is something that I am use to, and it will give me a start on my searchable photos that are fully captioned. Once I have them all cataloged, I planned on adding the additional keywords. As a sports photographer, it is extremely important to know what photos I have of what player. That is my problem now... I have tons of photos that are never uploaded because they are part of a sequence. Knowing which are uploaded and to where will allow me more control of my work.

I am struggling with what files I need on DVD and what files I need on the hard drives and how I catalog them. Presently, most assignments I shoot are RAW. In the past, I shot RAW and JPEG. Maybe it is best to go back to that method so that I can keep the JPEG files on the harddrive and the RAW files on disc. Shooting that way cuts my time on creating JPEG files from the RAW files. That seems like a logical way to go. Some assignments are JPEG only, and I know what I need to do with those... I converted one of my assignments from RAW to DNG. It was approximately 500 photos, and it took about 40 minutes. Available light assignments might be double that per game.

As far as cataloging, I am still very perplexed with what to do... I knew creating a catalog for every shoot was not the way to go. I saw that as a problem in itself, just as you described. Presently, I plan on keeping my catalog running on 2 computers, and as you said backing it up regularly. I am sure all of this seems a bit elementary to those that have been following a DAM system for some time, but my main concern is doing it right now so that I do not have to redo it in 6 months.

Thanks,


Paul

[peterkrogh]

Paul,
How's it going?  Did you start the cataloging process?  Are you able to sort the images into some semblance of an order?
Peter