Many programs brag about their “Digital Asset Management” tools. There isn’t a clear definition and the programs all tout different features. A DAM is basically a program that allows you to organize photos and view them.
Here is my goal for DAM: keep photos organized in order to able to find the ones I want when I want them. Without going through all 100,000 of them every time I need something. I use photos for two blogs, print-on-demand products, and projects like photo books…and just sharing with family and friends. I often do significant processing of photos, using several different programs and techniques. The post the photo processing tools in my belt describes some of the programs I use, some of which have DAM integrated with the editing capability.
Background
Everything was going along fairly smoothly. Then my world was turned upside-down when Adobe LightRoom went to cloud-based, subscription only…and made it so I could not load my older, stand-alone version on my new computer.
LightRoom is a great program, even my old version 5 is really great. But I do not have access to the internet all the time and I make no money from my photography. So, suddenly, I was in the market for something new.
Since then, I have been testing new methods out and trying to learn about how to best organize things. One thing I learned, the hard way, is that the first thing to do is organize the photo files on the computer itself.
Organize photos on my computer
When you change to a new program, regardless of what it is, you need to get your photos (assets) loaded. That means finding them! To keep functional while you are transitioning, it is very helpful if the photos are in one place, and organized. That way you don’t have to load all 100,000 at one time. You can load a test set, then tell quickly where you are in the process of loading. You can also find the photos you need for a particular project pretty quickly.
I wasn’t horribly disorganized, but I had changed my method a couple of times, and gotten lax about overall organization since the LightRoom catalog had all my photos in it. Since I was familiar enough with where things were that I didn’t notice peculiarities much and didn’t feel like spending hours reorganizing things. (The only disadvantage to LightRoom as a DAM is that changing file locations in your operating system causes LR to lose track of them, and using LR to reorganize is painfully slow.) At the time when LightRoom pushed me out I had about 80,000 original photos.
So, what to do?
I have approximately 100,000 original photos. They range from the recent ones taken with my new-ish camera that takes both JPG and RAW files, to scans of slides my father took when he was in the navy in 1960 and when we were kids. The file names are all higgledy-piggledy because they come from different cameras and scanning machines.
Renaming all of these files was not reasonable, so I chose to use the operating system’s folder structure to create a framework. I use a Windows computer, but Apples work about the same.
I have three types of files I need to keep straight:
- My original files
- My working files
- The files I exported for use
Organize Original Photo Files
I put most of my energy into organizing my original photos, which can be used to recreate the other two sets in a pinch.
File Type
The way I do this is to have folders by image type, I have two types: JPG and ARW (Sony’s flavor of RAW). I keep all of my JPG files in one folder and all of my ARW files in another. Within each of those two folders I use a chronological structure.
I keep the two types separate because I process them differently. I tend to be anal about having the ARW and JPG in the folder names so I can be clear what I am looking at, no matter where I am in the folder structure.
Chronological Order
Chronological isn’t as easy as it seems
JPG Files
For the scans of slides, old photos and negatives I often don’t know the exact year, so I use folder names like “1960-70s_Dads_scanned_slides”, “2001-2003-APS_scanned_negatives”. If I have better information on some of the pictures, I make a sub-folder, for example, “2000-Fall-Trip_to_New_England”. Getting more and more of them into files like that is an on-going project.
Putting a year as the first part of the folder name makes the list of folders come out in chronological order.
In the JPG folder I also have a separate folder for photos from my cell phone. I keep them separately because the file names don’t mesh with what came out of my camera, and the computer gives makes the date the date that it makes the copy, not what is in the file.
For photos taken with my digital cameras it is easier to keep things organized. Chronological order using sub-folders for months and days works well because the camera rolls file names at 9999 back to 0001. It doesn’t happen every day, so you wouldn’t wind up with two 0001s on one day, but you might have two or three in a year.
RAW Files
My ARW files are organized with a folder for year, then sub-folder for month, then, within the month, sub-folders for each day that I took photos. A top-level folder is 2020-ARW. Within that folder are the sub-folders 2020-01-ARW and 2020-02-ARW. Within each of those are day folders (but only if I took photos on that day).
Then there is the exception: I usually want to keep all photos from a trip together. There are two ways this falls out.
If the trip straddles two months, I create a month level folder for the trip and give it a name that causes it to be displayed between the two months, like in the example above.
If the trip is all in one month then I make a day level folder for the trip, and within that folder a folder for each day of the trip.
Worth the effort!
Once I got my photos organized this way it was much easier to find what I needed, regardless of what programs I was using. It was a very worthwhile effort. For JPG files you can view everything you have right in your operating system.
For RAW files you need to use a translation (demosaic-ing) program. There are many of these available. The topic of my next post!
With this organization system for the original files it is easy to test a new digital asset management program on a subset, then easily load all the other files in after you have decided it is worth the effort.
Edited Files
In addition to my original photos I have two places that I use to organize edited photos.
Projects
I have a folder called “working_files” for my current projects: this might be a family calendar, a blog post, uploads for print-on-demand products, etc. This folder is to keep the files I might need to rework or add to a project until I don’t need them anymore. This is my messiest folder. The only thing I do here is to try and make sure the individual project folders have meaningful names.
Exported photos
Once I am ready, I export photos to various places: two blogs, a couple of print-on-demand accounts, photo books, and just sharing with family. I keep copies of these files, sorted by where they went, in my “X-ported_Files” folder (I use X so that is the last folder in my list, making it easy to find).
Keep It Simple, Sweetie!
This method to organize photos is simple, but a complex system would be harder to remember and maintain.