Marc Sabatella August 24th, 2007

Basic Concepts

Most likely, the workflow I am going to describe is going to represent a significant change from how you have been doing things thus far. In The DAM Book, Peter Krogh puts forth a number of very eloquent arguments to convince the reader why some of the changes are necessary, and if you having trouble why I am suggesting some of the things I am, I encourage you to read Krogh’s book. I am going to just summarize some of the main points.

• The most important factor in keeping images organized so that you can find them later is metadata. This includes ratings, captions, keywords, and categories that you associate with your images. This information should live in a database so it can be easily searched even when the actual images are not present, and it should also be duplicated in the files themselves so that it stays with the files even if you make copies to send elsewhere. The more of this information you enter for an image, the easier it is to find that image later.
• The most important factor in keeping images organized so that you can easily back them up and restore them if necessary is keeping them in folders that correspond in some way to your backup media. For most of us, DVD is the backup media of choice, and this means keeping images in folders no larger than the size of a DVD (around 4.4 GB). Krogh calls these buckets, so I will use that term as well. New images go into your current bucket until it approaches 4.4 GB in size, at which point, you backup that bucket and start a new one. You do not go back and add images to old buckets, as this would make it difficult to tell what was backed up and what was not.
• In all the work you do, you will be most efficient if you do relatively more work with the more valuable images and relatively less work with the less valuable images, and if when searching for images later, you can easily restrict your search to the more valuable images. This means making consistent use of ratings.

These facts (the first two in particular) combine to yield an important conclusion: we will use metadata as opposed to filename or folder names to record virtually all important information about the content of our images. File and folder names will be automatically generated using a simple scheme that makes it easy to assign a unique name to each file and to determine what folder that file belongs in. This system will also make it easy to determine which files and folders have been backed up and which have not, and to locate the backup of any given file or folder should the need arise.

I should mention that if you already have a file management system in place you are completely comfortable with, you can of course use it instead of the “bucket” system. Most of us are not already so well organized, however, and the bucket system has the advantage of being simple to describe and implement. On the other hand, this system does require an adjustment to our usual way of thinking about file management.

Use of metadata means that a picture you took of your aunt Martha last Thanksgiving gets keywords such as “Martha” and “Thanksgiving,” and perhaps others if you like. This allows ACDSee Pro to find the image at any point in the future using a simple keyword search, without your having to remember what you called the file or what folder you put it in. If this search yields too many “hits,” we can narrow it further by including more keywords or by using the date.

The use of metadata does not mean your images and folders cannot have descriptive names, but it does free you to name them in a way that facilitates storage management and backup. While there are many possible schemes you could use, the bucket system is one that many professional photographers use, and it works well. Use of the bucket system means that the picture you took of your aunt Martha last Thanksgiving does not get a name that has anything to do with Martha or Thanksgiving, nor does it live in a folder with other photos of Martha or of other Thanksgivings. Instead, the file will get a unique but generic name that includes the date shot. You will add this file to a folder (the current bucket) that contains your most recently shot images, whether they were from Thanksgiving or not. If your current bucket fills up before you finish adding pictures from Thanksgiving, the remainder can go into the next bucket. You won’t worry about keeping all your Thanksgiving pictures in one folder by themselves, as that would not be optimal for backup purposes. And you definitely won’t combine pictures from other Thanksgiving celebrations with pictures from this year’s celebration, or pictures of your aunt Martha from several years ago with more recent pictures of Martha, into the same folder.

In addition to the storage management advantages of this type of naming system, the fact that we are not including content information in the file or folder names gives us added incentive to be thorough in our use of metadata.

I know it took me a while to accept the wisdom of this arrangement, and if you are in doubt, I encourage you to read The DAM Book for more information, as he is able to take the time to be much more persuasive than I. And again, if you have a system that works for you, feel free to continue using it. But I am going to simply hope you will bear with me as I outline a workflow that will enable you to get more out of the bucket system of image organization than you may otherwise have thought possible.

I should also mention that I am primarily describing the steps you will take every time you download pictures from your camera to your computer – the process of attaching metadata and filing your images away so that they become a permanent part of your collection. What you actually do with this collection is up to you, of course, but I am hopeful that, as you start organizing your images in the way I describe, it will be reasonably clear to you how to take advantage of this system in your subsequent work with your images.

Setup

You will need to start by figuring out where you like to keep your images permanently. If you currently have less than 100GB and do not expect to shoot more than 100GB of images per year, then you can easily keep all your images on a single hard drive. I would recommend an external drive so it can easily be replaced. You could start with a 200GB drive now, and by the time that fills up, you will probably be able to replace it with a drive that is several times that capacity and costs less than the 200GB drive will cost now. This should be good enough for the next several years, and you can probably repeat this process more or less indefinitely – hard drives will probably continue to get bigger and cheaper. If you do currently have too many images to fit on a single drive, or expect your image collection to grow faster than hard drive storage capacities increase over time, you will need to manage some sort of multidisk system. In any case, in addition to storing your images on hard drives, you should also be backing up to DVD.

Once you have the disk in place, create a top level folder for your pictures. Underneath that, create folders called ORIGINAL and DERIVATIVE. Underneath ORIGINAL create a folder called DVD_ORG_001 – this is your first “bucket” for your original images. Underneath DERIVATIVE create one called DVD_DRV_001 – this will be a a bucket for any processed copies you end up creating.

You will also need a folder called WORKING. I would recommend having this on your local hard drive, not the external one. You could put it under My Pictures if you like. If your main computer is a notebook and you would like to access images while away from your main storage disk, create another local folder called PROOF.

Depending on your tolerance for risk and how long you tend to leave pictures lying around in the WORKING folders before completing your processing of the files and moving them to the ORIGINAL folders where they can be permanently backed up, you might want to create a backup strategy for your WORKING files. An easy way to do this with ACDSee Pro is to use File->Sync to copy your WORKING files to your external drive periodically. Once you set up how you want the sync to work, running the job can be done in just a couple of keystrokes and provides a simple backup option. Or you can write the contents of WORKING to a rewritable DVD periodically. Of course, either of these assume you have access to the necessary external media. If you are working from your laptop while away from home, you may want to consider a portable hard drive for backup of your working files. Of course, if your DVD drive is built-in to your laptop, then it is a simple enough matter to carry a few blank disks with you.

If you are like me, you will also come to value keyboard shortcuts for the commands you use the most, using View->Toolbars->Customize->Keyboard, and you will probably want to arrange the various ACDSee Pro windows in a way that works well for you. There are also some program options you will probably want set in particular ways. But these are mostly things you may want to figure out for yourself once you see how the process works for you. I will from time to time mention the settings I use. There are a few you will need to set in order to use the workflow at all, so I will list them here:

Tools->Options->General, Date/Time output format
select Custom, type “yyMMdd” in the Date box, and make sure the Time box is clear

Tools->Options->Database, Database date
set to EXIF Date

Database->Excluded Folder Settings
make sure you are not excluding your external drive from the database
(or any other folders you will be using in this workflow)

I am assuming that you already have a bunch of images you have taken in the past that you want to organize, but I would suggest first getting familiar with the workflow using new images, and then going back and migrating you old images into this system. You might want to estimate how many DVDs of existing images you have (total size in GB divided by 4) and create buckets for them right away, so you can put your new images into the proper numbered bucket instead of starting with DVD_ORG_001.

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