Keywords, overcomplication

[Marcin Ciszewicz]

In my attempt to prepare a vocabulary for a catalog of my pictures, I have noticed an emerging problem related to the content I intend to sort. As a scale modeler, I gather loads of photos from many sources - there's a 60+ gigabyte mirror of Prime Portal on my disk, and that's just the tip of the iceberg - and I cannot decide, how complicated my vocabulary should be. Curiously enough, most keywords are easy to formulate, but cataloging the names of photographed objects themselves is a pain.

Here's an example: I have a set of pics from Aberdeen Proving Ground with a Panther tank - easy name, right? Well, wrong. If I wanted to be real exact, I should use keywords made out of its official name, which is Sonderkraftfahrzeug (Sd. Kfz.) 171, Panzerkampfwagen (Pz. Kpfw.) VI Panther, and that gets complicated further with each production series. Now, since most WW II German vehicles followed this scheme, theoretically, in order to be really accurate, I should make two groups of keywords: one for Sd. Kfz. numbers, and one for Pz. Kpfw. numbers, each individual number split into production versions. Thus, I'd probably end up with:

Sonderkraftfahrzeug
>171
>179
>182 and so on

Panzerkampfwagen
>VI
>>Ausfuhrung A
>>Ausfuhrung D and so on

... and that's without shortcuts for both German terms and without vehicle names. Is there any way I could simplify this scheme a bit?

[Roelof]

What DAM system are You using?

[Marcin Ciszewicz]

Expression Media 2, and having lots of fun with it, apart from my vocabulary problems.

[Roelof]

When you say "most keywords are easy to formulate, but cataloging the names of photographed objects themselves is a pain", why don't you add all keywords to the images in 'Info panel' view? In this view it's easy to go further from one keyword to the next with 'Tab'. Keywording is very fast this way.

Later, you can bring order and structure into the collection with 'Catalog sets'. With search and/or filtering your collection on certain keywords you can easily add images into a structure as you described (or another, when necesary in time).

In my experience it's is much less time consuming to add straight away some keywords in Info Panel View than drag and drop photo's onto (hierachical) keywords in Organize Panel View, especially on such 'flat' structures (two levels deep) as you described.

Only on very 'deep' structures ( 5 levels or more) you could save time by using hierachical keyword, i think.
Roelof