Digital Asset Management is the term used to describe the handling and management of digital assets, in this case images. It’s most likely the most boring part of being a photographer and sometimes way too restrictive and left brained for our wildly creating minds.
If you are an enthusiast I highly recommend some form of logical and repeatable approach to you photographic workflow. If however you charge money for your images it is a prerequisite!
There are benefits other than a tidy desktop! If done properly (and this means spending more that 5 min dumping all the images from your desktop into one folder) it will remove the stress from managing you images, having duplicates of images or 12 edits of the same image scattered about, your images will be safe and most importanty some time invested now will free up more time to get out and rack up more hours behind that camera.
These are some of the principals to follow:
Image organisation
Keep a folder for each Job (properly labelled e.g. Year-Date-Shoot name )
Rename all images in a similar fashion (using the cameras assigned image name is not very use full)
Separate your RAW (original) images from your edited work within the main folder.
Image Storage
Always keep more than one copy of your work. At least 2 copies.
If you have a large image library and your computer is near capacity use external hard drives to work from, it will speed up your computers performance.
Good Software
Use a descent software to view and organise your images, like Lightroom, Aperture, CaptureOne, Photoshop Bridge or iview media Pro to name a few.
Let us know if you want more information on this subject but for now check out this video by Chase Jarvis, a top commercial photographer based in Seattle. Their approach is geared towards a large professional studio but the principals apply to us all.
