Image management solution? (1 Viewer)

kyyroju · Mar 1, 2006

I have currently close to 30000 pics taken with my DSLR, and the number of pics keeps increasing by hundreds every week. (And then there's all the slides and and films from the past few decades of my life that I would like to digitize...)

I'm looking for a suitable image management software to create a database (with metadata) of all the pics I've taken. One of the most critical functions - in my opinion - is the ability to handle multiple versions of the same picture in the database. Unfortunately I'm not aware a good solution that would do this and with a reasonable price.
Imatch ( http://www.photools.com ) comes very close to my requirements both in capabilities and price, but it lacks proper support for multiple versions.
Any good solutions known and in use?

Why do I have multiple version of one picture? I shoot everything in RAW, then when I get home I use Photoshop batch to create a full set of jpg's from the originals. If a pic is good enough I might put it on my web site and that means at least two versions - thumbnail and the actual pic. I might put the same pic also into the gallery here and it will be of different size in pixels. Plus any edited pic I will also keep a near full resolutiin edited tiff file. So quite a few version of one photo.

stuartlawrie · Mar 1, 2006

kyyroju said:
I have currently close to 30000 pics taken with my DSLR, and the number of pics keeps increasing by hundreds every week. (And then there's all the slides and and films from the past few decades of my life that I would like to digitize...)

I'm looking for a suitable image management software to create a database (with metadata) of all the pics I've taken. One of the most critical functions - in my opinion - is the ability to handle multiple versions of the same picture in the database. Unfortunately I'm not aware a good solution that would do this and with a reasonable price.
Imatch ( http://www.photools.com ) comes very close to my requirements both in capabilities and price, but it lacks proper support for multiple versions.
Any good solutions known and in use?

Why do I have multiple version of one picture? I shoot everything in RAW, then when I get home I use Photoshop batch to create a full set of jpg's from the originals. If a pic is good enough I might put it on my web site and that means at least two versions - thumbnail and the actual pic. I might put the same pic also into the gallery here and it will be of different size in pixels. Plus any edited pic I will also keep a near full resolutiin edited tiff file. So quite a few version of one photo.

You could always go for good old Adobe Elements 4, the cataloguing in this supports what it calls version sets, so you can when saving a copy even if it is a cropped or edited version chose to save it in a version set!
Also if you have taken several frames of the same shot, you can choose to highlight them then right click and stack them into a single icon representation in the catalogue.

Dave Adshead · Mar 1, 2006

kyyroju said:
I have currently close to 30000 pics taken with my DSLR, and the number of pics keeps increasing by hundreds every week. (And then there's all the slides and and films from the past few decades of my life that I would like to digitize...)

I'm looking for a suitable image management software to create a database (with metadata) of all the pics I've taken. One of the most critical functions - in my opinion - is the ability to handle multiple versions of the same picture in the database. Unfortunately I'm not aware a good solution that would do this and with a reasonable price.
Imatch ( http://www.photools.com ) comes very close to my requirements both in capabilities and price, but it lacks proper support for multiple versions.
Any good solutions known and in use?

Why do I have multiple version of one picture? I shoot everything in RAW, then when I get home I use Photoshop batch to create a full set of jpg's from the originals. If a pic is good enough I might put it on my web site and that means at least two versions - thumbnail and the actual pic. I might put the same pic also into the gallery here and it will be of different size in pixels. Plus any edited pic I will also keep a near full resolutiin edited tiff file. So quite a few version of one photo.

kyyroju,

You need some DAM software, digital asset management. 30,000 images is a lot to keep track of, but with proper DAM it's easy.
Regarding duplicates, I usually add an extra letter in the file name, i.e. D, stands for derivative, or D1, D2 depending on how many there are.
I use iViewMediaPro, its a touch expensive, but very good. You can try it free for 21 days.
Follow this link www.iview-multimedia.com/

Also, I can recommend a good book, The DAM book, Digital Asset Management for Photographers by Peter Krogh. www.thedambook.com/index.html follow this link and you'll be able to download a free chapter PDF.

Best of luck
Dave

compa · Mar 4, 2006

A cheaper option is ACDSee - it has pretty good database and search functions. But you have a huge backlog of photos to catalog. I would recommend you become very well acquainted with the use of your computer's delete key. I'm sure you have at least 20,000 photos that you will never, ever print or put on the internet or even give a second look. Get rid of them!

The "delete key" is your friend ... use it often!

Image management solution? (1 Viewer)

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kyyroju

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stuartlawrie

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Dave Adshead

How much!

compa

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