The DAM Book

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 🙂