Star ratings are one of the two most powerful tools we have in our digital workflow (the other being keywords)!

Suck that sentence up for a few seconds. Do you know why?

Basically, it’s because with keywords and star ratings, a database (catalog software, Lightroom library module etc) can sort our photos [...]]]>

Star ratings are one of the two most powerful tools we have in our digital workflow (the other being keywords)!

Suck that sentence up for a few seconds. Do you know why?

Basically, it’s because with keywords and star ratings, a database (catalog software, Lightroom library module etc) can sort our photos in a matter of seconds in the most powerful manner possible. With a couple of clicks we could sort 20,000 photos and filter them down to our absolute ‘best of’ folio collection or find those priceless photos of our dog eating our shoes. Without keywords and ratings, we have 20,000 photos to look through…

So they are very powerful. But HOW they are applied is equally important, and it is this subject I want to expound upon, after seeing some very famous and influential photographers (Scott Kelby and more recently David DuChemin) totally stuff it up. The influence these guys have is expansive, and not something I can compete with obviously, but I have to do my bit to remedy the situation…. More after the jump.

Star ratings are now a defacto standard. They are ubiquitous. Bridge, Lightroom, Aperture, Expression Media, IDimager, iView you name it. Star ratings are part of the XMP metadata core. Even Windows supports them natively. So support is not an issue. Unlike Lightroom’s Flags for examples, the usage of which Scott Kelby suggests is a better idea! Huh? Sure Scott. Let’s all spend countless hours ranking our photographs, and then lock ourselves into one single software solution for all time instead of using an already existing and much superior solution that is cross platform and application…

But even more important than support, star ratings are the only type of file based metadata that deals with how good an image is. That means that star ratings alone can help you sort your massive collection of images and filter them down to your very best, your best, or even your worst. All with a few clicks. But it all depends on HOW you apply star ratings. If you whack a 5 star rating on all your best images, as Kelby suggests (and even David DuChemin had done as I could see on his recent CreativeLive seminar), then you’ve just gone and thrown the power of star ratings out the window.

Why? There are actually several reasons. One is that you have no room for growth as a photographer. And hey, we all grow, no matter our age or professional status. So the first rule of thumb is to give yourself room to grow. Personally, I think most photographers can suffice with using just 1,2, and 3 stars for their collection. If you are really, really good, maybe you could use 4 stars for your absolute best of collection – you know, like your 50 signature shots. Basically everyone can leave the 5 star rating for when they have 10 years more growth and a 100,000 more images to sort through. Because this brings me to the second important way to use star ratings. The real power of a rating system is when it is a ratings pyramid, with the best images at the top being relatively scarce in relation to the total number of images in the catalogue. Again, if you have 20,000 images and 10,000 of them are rated as your best shots, it’s not going to help you much. If instead you have 200 images out of that 20,000 rated as your 3 or 4 star images, then there is a powerful and realistic representation of the best of your collection. So keeping the right proportions is important, and will keep your ratings pyramid in the right shape. Otherwise you might end up with a ratings light bulb, much less useful…

In his last book on Lightroom, Scott Kelby’s less than stellar advice was to rate all your good photos as 5 stars and delete the rest… I have to say I nearly fell over when I read that (luckily I was sitting down at the time). Then he went on to suggest that you shouldn’t even use ratings and that Flags in Lightroom was a better idea… Sheesh.. I imagine Peter Krogh would be frothing at the mouth at this.

So there you go. As part of your workflow, you should review your shoots and apply star ratings across the entire shoot. If you are using CR2 or NEF or other proprietary RAW file format, the information will sit in the xmp sidecar file. If you are using DNG as your RAW format, the star ratings will be written directly into the file. A possible rating system could look like this: 0 stars for shots you don’t want to delete, but are nothing special. Up to 50% of your personal work might get no star. 1 star would be a decent shot. 2 would be an excellent shot, and 3 stars would be reserved for your absolute best. A more thorough explanation and breakdown of this system can be found in Peter Krogh’s The Dam Book, or on the dpbestflow website.

I have to admit, I am seriously impressed with the Digital Photography Workflow website dpbestflow.org. An initiative of the American Society of Media Photographers and funded by the American Library of Congress, it is a fantastic resource for all digital photographers worldwide. It is mainly the work of Richard Anderson and Digital [...]]]>

I have to admit, I am seriously impressed with the Digital Photography Workflow website dpbestflow.org. An initiative of the American Society of Media Photographers and funded by the American Library of Congress, it is a fantastic resource for all digital photographers worldwide. It is mainly the work of Richard Anderson and Digital Asset Management guru, Peter Krogh, but of course let’s not forget there is always a large team behind any endevour of this size and quality.

The site covers pretty much every aspect of digital photography workflow you could think of. The layout and structure of the site is simply awesome – well thought out, logical and very user friendly. There are a wealth of graphics and videos to complement the crisp, concise writing, and the quality of the information is about as good as it gets.

There is also a companion book called Digital photography best practices and workflow handbook, put out by Richard Anderson and Patricia Russotti. This takes a broad look at digital workflow issues, and is partly the basis for the dpbestflow website. Another stellar resource that no doubt informed much of what’s on the dpbestflow site is Peter Krogh’s book on Digital Asset Management, called The Dam Book. Make sure you get the second version, as in that book you will almost 500 pages packed to the brim with top level information, which complements the dpbestflow website, but is very different at the same time. This book is very specific to Digital Asset Management, and together with the Digital photography best practices and workflow handbook and the dpbestflow.org website, is all you need to educate yourself about digital photography workflow.

So back to the website. Check it out. Bookmark it. And visit regularly. There is enough information to keep you busy for several months, and in my experience, it’s exactly the sort of information photographers need but don’t know they need. Of course every photographer wants to focus on shooting, but the business aspects are considered by many to be even more important, and workflow is a business subject as it ensures efficiency and professionalism.

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 for [...]]]>

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 for every scenario (multiple users in a studio setting or those that need multiple catalogues etc), but for the single user they are a very good one stop shop option.

They are both catalog applications and parametric image editors. In other words, they process the images and keep a catalog over the entire collection. And now that Aperture 3 allows you to export your image settings back into the DNG file,  it’s a cross platform and OS solution (who really wants to be locked into both OS and application forever – come on, that’s just not cricket!)

Microsoft seems to have been left floundering in the dust with its poorly-developed catalog software Expression Media. Once upon a time the predecessor to Expression Media, iView Media Pro was the professional’s choice of DAM software, along with Bridge and Camera Raw. Now, many have replaced all three with Lightroom, and Mac users have the extra option of Aperture.

Users who wish to stay with the triumvirate of Bridge/Camera Raw and Photoshop still have an incredibly powerful and excellent set of tools for image management, parametric image editing and and powerful bitmap editing, but using just these three apps, the cataloging side is missing. There’s not too many good stand alone catalog apps aside from the powerful yet flawed Expression Media, and besides, with the maturation of software like Lightroom and Aperture, there is less and less need for the non-integrated approach. True, a stand-alone catalog application will be more powerful than any of its integrated cousins, but a combined approach will suit many photographers right down to the ground. In many situations, even Photoshop is going out the door. Increasingly it is becoming possible for certain types of photographers to manage their entire work flow, from file ingestion through processing to output like prints & web galleries just in Lightroom alone.

The other bonus is that it spreads Digital Asset management principles out there (despite Kelby’s less than stellar attempts at educating the public about DAM {see my earlier post}) and enriches the DAM side of  a photographers work flow, even if many of them don’t realise that yet.

I’m still on the sidelines, preferring my Bridge / Camera Raw approach for the moment, as there is something difficult to define, that I don’t like about Lightroom. I’m still trying to figure out what it is though. It feels like it’s hiding things from me. Maybe I just don’t know it well enough yet… Is it really time to migrate to a single app solution? It’s sure looking like that time is coming. Microsoft paid a lot of money for the leading DAM app at the time, yet it seems like Adobe and Apple are leading the way with integrated solutions. Whether they are fully robust from a DAM perspective is not entirely clear to me as yet, but I can see we are getting very, very close.

This is getting interesting.

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 [...]]]>

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.

My only disappointment with the book is that it doesn’t come with a dvd of videos Now I know I’m asking for a lot here, but I have watched Peter’s earlier videos, and it would have been great to watch him go through setting up preferences in Bridge and Lightroom, and talking about various workflow options. Sometimes, seeing is the best learning and this sort of material lends itself very well to a visual presentation.

Nonetheless, this is a fabulous book, and it’s at the very top of my list of recommended books for photographers that are serious about developing their workflow. For more information about Digital Asset Management, visit www.thedambook.com and check out the book, the forums, and everything else on offer. It’s the entrance to a world of digital file order

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 [...]]]>

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).

Peter Krogh, the DAM (Digital Asset Management) specialist, talks a whole lot about backup strategies in his book, The Dam Book. I’m not going into that much detail here, but there are a few things that are worthy of mention. There are many considerations when designing a backup system, including cost, scalability, and redundancy. With regards cost, he gives very good advice when he says to ‘buy the backup you need now, not in 18 months.’ I spent months looking into backup systems, including expensive raid arrays and JBoD boxes and home servers etc… That was because I was focussing on scalability more than cost. But all those solutions were too expensive, at least for me. I couldn’t justify the expense. So I thought about what I needed right now. And that was basically 1TB of storage. The quickest and cheapest solution would have been to just buy a cheap internal drive and an enclosure, and hey presto, a 1TB USB external drive. But the build quality of many cheap enclosures is suspect, and for a very similar price, you can get a entry level external drive. Then there is the question of interface. USB 2.0 is the basic requirement, but there’s also Firewire 400 and 800 and eSata (forget NAS devices for the moment).

In the end, I decided to take a small step up and get a WD My Book Home Edition. It has a triple interface (USB, Firewire 400 and eSata). I finally realised that there would be no instant implementation of a perfect system, and that it would be something I developed over time. My immediate requirement was to safely secure my data. I already have a 320GB external I built myself. That is now my secondary off-site backup, which is placed at a neighbours house. When I do a shoot, I backup to the 1TBdrive, and then go and collect the 320GB drive and backup to that, and then return it to the neighbours house. There’s my data in 3 places, one of them off-line. That is a secure backup.

But then there’s my system drive. At the moment I have my system drive ina  RAID array (Raid 1- mirroring). This is a great solution in the event of a total drive failure, as I have an exact copy ready to go. But what about OS problems? Recently I had a terrible security failure in Vista, which meant that the OS was basically kaput and needed to be re-installed, something I didn’t want to do. All those programs, all those settings… But I realised my mirrored drive now had exactly the same problems. Hmmm… So it seems to me, I need a complete mirror image of my drive to be backed up to an external drive whenever I make any major system changes or updates, and to have that stored offsite as well. So that means another external drive, and a program like Norton Ghost to make a mirror image. That has to come soon. Then, I should feel a little more confidant, that when (not if) a drive fails or the operating system decides to die, it will only be a new drive and a few hours, and all will be back as it was. That’s the idea anyway. Am I missing anything?

Basically, it involves everything between getting your images in on [...]]]> 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 on to your computer, through to when they are finally archived safely in various locations. It involves rating, labelling, keywording, file formats, catalogues, virtual sets, back ups and a whole lot more. It is the integration between Photoshop, a browser such as Bridge, and catalogue software such as iview Media Pro (now Microsoft Expression Media).

With DAM you are building value to a collection of images by organising them in a way that builds that value. Not only for you as a photographer, but also for your clients.

The bible is The Dam Book by Peter Krogh. Check out the website of course. And the forum. DAM is not a simple concept. Well, conceptually it is simple enough, but in practice it’s not simple. You might need to read the book several times and absorb it for months before doing the painstking work of getting your images into shape. yeah, it’s Boot Camp for digital images alright. I wish I’d read about it when I first bought my digital camera, not a year and 10,000 images later.

I will hazard a guess though – read the book and you’ll say at some point – “damn.. why haven’t I heard of this before”…

Technorati Tags: DAM, digital asset management, Peter Krogh

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 having [...]]]>

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 having a system in place to organise the workflow of digital images, from when they come on to the computer from the camera, to when they are finally archived. Many photographers who have been working with digital cameras for a few years now have amassed thousands of files. Possibly even hundreds of thousands. Without a solid DAM system in place, there’s no way any collection will be organised, easy to find pictures in, or will the workflow be consistent and streamlined. That’s what DAM is all about.

The guru for this process is Peter Krogh. His book is the bible for DAM. He also travels around the world giving seminars on the subject. There is of course a website: www.thedambook.com. I am in the process of reading “The DAM Book” right now, and my initial impression of DAM is this: it’s going to be painful, it’s going to take a long time to reorganise all my files and restructure my workflow. But in the long run, it’s definitely going to be worth it. Already I have trouble finding images. I am a reasonably organised type of person as it is, and I have instinctively incorporated some of the DAM principles into my own workflow (the idea of buckets as a backup concept primarily), but the whole thing has just been a little daunting until now. Now it’s very daunting But at least now I can see the benefits of such a system, and that how without it, I can forget about being a organised, proficient professional.

I will be going to one of his seminars in May, and I’m nowhere near even finishing the book yet, so a lot of work is ahead of me. I’ll update on this topic as I get further into it.

Technorati Tags: DAM, digital asset management, Peter Krogh, The DAM Book, digital photography workflow