Organization 101

The Proper Care And Feeding Of An Image Collection

Have you realized yet that you are a collector? Every time you take a picture or two or fifty your digital image collection grows, as it will the rest of your life. Some prefer the term of "library" for their assembled image files, as it seems to them that a "collector" implies being ... odd. Eccentric. Perhaps ... even an odd, eccentric English-person! So, they prefer to think of themselves as a Librarian ... really, that's better? To me, it's a euphemistic standoff. And I do think "collection" is a better fit for the term to use for your digital image files.

Now that we've established you DO have a collection, whether you wanted to or not, we need to move beyond simply snapping pics and burying them on a computer someplace. We need to begin the work of managing a collection of images, to plan and implement a system of working and playing with our images that provides safety for your collection, ease of use for both finding and using your images, adequate embedded information in your images so anyone will know who/what they are about, and portability through the inevitable progression of hardware and software. That last sentence took me only seven or eight years to really understand. I'll explain it so that you can get in one easy lesson to where I am after working for years at this professionally!

Each of the following Imperatives will have it's own article/class session.

THE FOUR IMPERATIVES

There is an order of importance to this list, mostly because ... if you don't keep your image collection safe and a crash of some hardware or software causes the disappearance of your collection, the other points are moot, aren't they? Second, if it isn't easy to view and work with your images, how are you going to find the stamina and courage to record any information in them? And third ... if you don't have an adequate amount of information contained in the files, who cares if you migrate them to the next hardware/software generation? So here we go ... the Four Imperatives in order:

IMAGE/COLLECTION SAFETY

This imperative is all about safe handling practices for your digital files, whether still in-camera, on memory cards waiting to be up-loaded, on a drive in a computer, and on whatever backup media you choose to use. There are really only two keys to keep in mind for this imperative: safe migration and handling practices from one form of storage to another, and REDUNDANCY.

You want your tools and techniques while moving your files around or working on them to be harmless to the underlying image archives, and yet allow you to manipulate both the images themselves and the data in the images' metadata fields safely and easily. For example, when uploading to the computer from your camera or memory card, a "Best Practice" (a "BP" in my terminology) is to upload the images to at LEAST a second location on the computer (to a second drive or media say, DVD or CD) and "validate" the uploads BEFORE wiping or re-formatting the memory card. There are automated tools to help with this, and we'll look at them in the article/class on Collection Safety.

Have *I* always done this? Of course not! Have I gotten by? Well, mostly. But the failures have been painful. We didn't do this on a big fashion shoot last summer for example ... and later found we couldn't find ANYTYHING from one entire location of the shoot. This is a most painful and embarrassing way to learn new and better computer practices, and I do NOT advise following my example!

EASE OF USE

If you cannot easily "handle" your files, moving them around your system with confidence and reliability, find particular images or groups to view or show, "work" or "cook" them in your image-manipulation programs, and return the "cooked" files to a proper place in your collection, are you going to reliably do ANY of these things? Of course not ... we are humans, not mindless computers; and we DON'T do the bloody hard way reliably for any length of time. We start fudging ... and finally forget how to get back to where we were. No, we all need clear and easy paths to follow so that we can be expected to actually follow through on the ins and outs of managing and working our images. THIS SHOULD BE FUN WHENEVER POSSIBLE ... and what drudgery there is should be set up for the computer to do without our having to hardly think about it.

The software and hardware tools until recently have been mostly designed for playing with one image at a time, or at most a small group of images. It was much harder to plan out an organized system and a pattern of using the system than it is now. I'll cover several systems involving different types and combinations of programs to accomplish the needs of photographers ranging from a few images a week to a few hundred a day in the articles/classes to come.

ADEQUATE INFORMATION IN THE METADATA

One of the problems with the old negatives/prints/slides system was keeping track of who was in the picture, when and why it was taken, and by whom. Your family probably has the boxes of old photos we have. Some of "our" family images were taken in the 1920's and 1930's in North Dakota, while my Dad was growing up, and HE didn't even remember who the people in the pics were or even recognize the farms the pics were taken on. How are we supposed to have a clue? And yet, some of those images might have a great deal of meaning if we only knew anything about them.

Digital images come with a whole HOST of places to store information, so much so that we can go hog-wild and soon find ourselves taking HOURS to load the metadata for every new family party or outing. That kind of effort simply is NOT sustainable, and soon, we won't be recording anything. What we want to design is a system for deciding the APPROPRIATE amount and kind of information to add in to our image files, so that we know enough about them without also storing the detail that the unrecognizable building in the right back corner is part of Hart's Drug Store ... unless that information is VERY interesting or historical, of course.

We will want to know the main people and the place it was taken, and perhaps the event ... and we will want a system for "keywords" such that we list the same type of event the same way all the time, and people are always listed the same way. Such a system allows the computer to do a quick search to find everything with Bob Moe in it, or all of the pics at Aunt Hattie’s' famous birthday bashes, without our having to comb through folder after folder to manually find them.

Proper planning and use of Metadata/Keywords is a crucial part of making you image collection a joy to visit and play with. I've struggled with this the entire time I've used digital cameras, and will include my latest-greatest ideas in the articles/classes to come on this subject.

PORTABILITY

You may have noticed how frequently software programs change. Every eighteen months, if not sooner, Adobe comes out with new versions of their major programs, and in-between there are upgrades of the "current" program with new "dot" releases ... going from say Lightroom 2.4 to Lightroom 2.5 (think "two dot five"). I recently bought Photoshop Elements 7, and it was only a few months "old" as a release. But Adobe had already re-designed large parts of the program, and decided to launch the next release as a major upgrade rather than a "dot". So ... in a matter of what, four months, my "new" program became the "old" program.

Once upon a time, you couldn't even imagine a "terabyte" of drive storage, and now ... why get a smaller drive? "Then", leaving all our images on a "live" system of archive hard-drives  was expensive beyond belief, so we backed-up to CD's and deleted the images off the hard-drives. Now, the drives are often cheaper per megabyte than CD's/DVD's.

Both the hardware you use to store, view, and enjoy your image collection AND the software you use to do all this with will change. You need to plan for that continual change within your collection's system design, so that each time you migrate your collection to new gear and software, you keep all the work and data (and the value those added to your images!) available in the collection's new "home".

RELAX!

None of the above is as hard or daunting as it first appears, and I'll be laying out both the ideals and thought-processes for each section as well as several specific suggested alternatives to accomplish each objective. And always keep in mind that the intention of the whole process is to get your image collection and handling practices set so that it is quick and easy to find and do things with your images so that both now and in the future, you'll enjoy looking at and playing with them.

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