placement of catalogs and how to organize acess them

[Sossity Corby]

I see how catalogs are a key part to DAM, & have a few questions for those who have them & experience with them;

Placement of the ivew or expression media catalog; where do users store them? should I save my catalogs of my originals on the same hard drive along with the buckets with my Raw folders? does iveiw or expression media catalogs need access to the original files? if the catalogs are small enough, I would like to be able to store them on a flash USB drive. How do I back up the catalogs? with a separate bucket directory of just catalogs? what would be the best medium for backup?

how to split up the catalogs; should I have one big catalog with everything arranged in the same way as my originals & buckets? ie; a catalog of a bucket Raw_001? & so on? that mirrors the originals directory?

As I am moving over to a DAM way of doing things, can ivew or expression media do a search of content based on any type of meta data like keywords or category of the originals content on my external hard drive? or do these programs only search through saved catalogs?

Sossity

[rod barbee]

Sossity,

read The DAM book. All these questions are answered there.
You can place your catalogs anywhere you like, where ever makes the most sense to you. Keeping them on the same drive as your images is as good a plan as any.
I wouldn't put it on a flash drive just because of access issues. It might be nice to have a backup or duplicate of your catalog(s) on a flash drive so you can access them on a laptop.
I back up my catalogs on a daily schedule to an external drive in a "catalog backups" folder. You can also back them up to dvd, cd, etc.
Splitting up catalogs should be done by what makes sense to you. I could have a "nature" catalog, a "product shoots" catalog, etc. Or it could all go into one big catalog. Having a catalog for each bucket sort of defeats the purpose of a catalog; you might as just well manage images folder by folder then.

I don't quite understand your last question. EM and Iview (and IDImager, and Lightroom, etc) can search all image content. That's kind of the point of a cataloging program. I'm not sure what you mean about these programs only searching through saved catalogs. The cataloging program can search through cataloged images: you first have to import them into the catalog. A browser, like Bridge can look at folders and extract this information, but it first has to read all the images. A cataloging program does all this much faster.

If you read The DAM Book, much of this will become clearer.

rod