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Digital Asset Management is going mainstream. And most people don’t even realise it. With the development of Lightroom to version 3 (currently in beta) and the recent release of Aperture 3, sophisticated stand-alone DAM tools are reaching photographers everywhere. They may not be perfect at all aspects of DAM, or suitable [...]  The DAM Book I’ve just finished Peter Krogh’s book on Digital Asset Management, The DAM Book. Recently published in a second edition, it’s not just a slight update on the first edition, which I talked about here. The new DAM Book completely re-looks at Digital Asset Management in light of recent software developments and trends, most notably Lightroom, but also great little apps like ImageIngester Pro. A lot of what Peter writes about hasn’t changed from his first volume, but in some cases it has, and in others it has just been refined. Mostly though, it has been expanded to look at new workflow options with Lightroom, and seems to cover more ground with the management of working files, and the areas of data validation and the ingestion process. It’s a much bigger book than the first tome, weighing in at over 460 pages. Now, I’m sure Peter would be the first to admit that this is not lightweight casual reading. It’s technical, and at times, a tad dry, but if you are passionate about your digital photography, and even more to the point, you are someone who wants to learn how best to manage and leverage those assets, then you will plough through this book in the first instance, and then come back and re-read it several times to enable the gradual implementation of all his good advice. For this is no lightweight matter. For someone with 10,000 digital images randomly thrown into folders on their computers, not properly backed up and in proprietary file formats, this is going to be a long, big job. But bringing your archive up to DAM standards will be one of the most valuable things you could ever do to your collection, and this book shows you precisely how, and why, to do it. The structure of the book is awesome. He starts at the start, with a discussion on why we need Digital Asset Management, what the objectives and benefits are, and then he continues from there. There is a logical flow to the subjects he discusses, and a really good mix of theory, implementation and examples.You can see a list of the Table of Contents for the new book on Peter’s site, here.
In an earlier post, I spoke about back-up and the need to develop a system that does what it needs to do – save your data from all potential loss, and allow you to get back up and running in the quickest possible time. Photographers have special requirements with regards backup. They generate huge volumes of data in a very short time. It would be in no way unusual that in one photo shoot, I might generate from up to 4GB of data. And this is data, that if lost, is totally irreplaceable. The sheer size of it as well precludes online backup strategies for most, as upload speeds are too slow, and adsl account limits are often 20GB or less (this is of course only an issue if your ISP includes uploads as part of your allowance). I have been thinking more about workflow. I am a DAM and a DNG convert, and have been slowly trying to turn these approaches and tools into an efficient system. There are several workflow solutions, and it would appear that one of the most popular is the Bridge / iView Media Pro (now Expression [...] If you don’t know what DAM is, I could be rude and suggest you are not a serious photographer. Now I won’t because I am a polite boy, but really, if you are serious about digital photography, you simply have to be serious about DAM. Basically, it involves everything between getting your images in [...] If you don’t know, UPDIG stands for UNIVERSAL PHOTOGRAPHIC DIGITAL IMAGING GUIDELINES. This is a set of guidelines developed for digital imaging by the UPDIG Working Group, descibed on their website as “A working group of digital imaging professionals and allied trade groups and manufacturers, dedicated to promoting worldwide standards in the commercial application [...] The DAM Book I recently bought a book, which, even though I’m not even half way through it, I believe is an essential purchase for anyone serious about photography, whether amateur or professional. The book is called The DAM Book, and the topic is, naturally enough, Digital Asset Management. It’s basically about [...] |
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