Best Business Practices for Photographers [206]
For example, consider an image of a young man and his father out fishing. The caption might read, "Father and son go fishing." But keywords for that same image could be "parenting," "quality time," "bonding," "lake," "fatherhood," and on and on. These are the search terms that photo buyers start with—commonsense thoughts—and then they will progress from there should their search results not yield images that meet their needs.
Krogh goes on to discuss hardware systems to properly accomplish the workflow goals set forth—everything from drive sizes, types, and quantities (for redundancy), to the promotion of DVDs as archive solutions.
Solutions Beyond The DAM Book: Adapting the Principles to a Variety of Workflows
When The DAM Book was written, Krogh made a thoughtful and, in my opinion, thorough review of the software available and integrated it into the book's workflow solution. I already had several of his ideas in place, and I gained more than a few insights into how I could improve my workflow. I applied that knowledge to make my post-production operations more efficient.
There are a few applications that are out there for your consideration. What we're not talking about here are browsers. Browsers are simply tools that allow you to browse your images. Browsers allow you to rename files, manage the moving/copying of files (especially off of memory cards), and apply metadata, including the rating/ranking of images using the star-rating or color-label systems. The two best known are Adobe Bridge, which comes with Photoshop, and Camera Bits' Photo Mechanic. Bridge, in my opinion, is a bit unwieldy for fast, on-the-fly browsing of images. Photo Mechanic, on the other hand, is an amazingly fast program that gives you incredible control over the browsing of your images. I can't imagine any photographer who wouldn't benefit from having Photo Mechanic in their toolkit for fast and easy access to their images. Run, don't walk, to www.CameraBits.com and get your copy. That said, for archiving, cataloging, and other long-term image management needs, the following sections describe three of the best solutions for your consideration.
Adobe Lightroom
I consider Lightroom the best all-around solution for photographers. I have tried the others, and Lightroom just comes out on top.
First, the downsides… Lightroom does not support a number of file formats, such as video and PDFs, and unless you select Maximize Compatibility when you are saving an Adobe PSD file, Lightroom won't support it fully. In addition, certain TIFs with compression settings, as well as the newer JPEG formats, are not usable in Lightroom.
That said, Lightroom supports fully all major cameras' raw files, reads and writes DNG files, exports great JPEGs, and is highly customizable for presets for all of the repetitive things you do. It is fully functional with all manner of metadata, and whatever metadata you add to an image that resides in the Lightroom catalog, you can instruct Lightroom to write that back to the file itself—so if you were to open the file outside of Lightroom (in Photoshop, Photo Mechanic, and so on), you would see your metadata. Although there are some potential pitfalls in using the color labels, Lightroom otherwise keeps your metadata as you intend it.
In addition, Lightroom does a great job of handling catalogs across multiple hard drives, as well as having multiple catalogs. You can't have more than one catalog open at a time, nor can you search across closed catalogs (as you can in Expression Media), but the organizational functionality of Lightroom makes it the best solution for me. Tom Hogarty, who works for Adobe and leads the Lightroom team, recommends that if you want to use multiple computers to access your images, you utilize a primary computer for image management using Lightroom and all other computers connect to that computer across your network and access the images using Bridge (or, we might suggest, Photo Mechanic). Lightroom is both a PC and a Mac application.
Expression Media
iView MediaPro became