DAM and Buckets
DAM and Buckets
Peter Krogh wrote a book: The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers published by O'Reilly in 2005. It's a very interesting book. Digital Asset Management1 become very important once we switched from analog/film based photos to digitally based photos.
The book tries to answer the basic question of how to store the photos and how to make it so you can find and retrieve the photos.
Buckets
One of the core tenets is that you store your data into buckets, and these buckets should be the size of the media you use for backup. At the time (2003 & 2004), the backup medium was mostly CD/DVDs. One of his proposed solutions was to use the naming of the buckets by date and the bucket either is 800Mb for CDs or 4.2Gb for the DVDs. Cataloging software would keep track of in which bucket is each photo. I don't like the concept of the bucket.
Digital Photos
- Stop thinking of photos
- Start thinking files
In a digital world, there is photos do not exists, only files. These files represent photos. How to you store your Word documents? In buckets? I don't, do you? I doubt it.
Either you can store your digital files either in:
- A database: databases can be extremely, very, very, very... large in the petabytes2 size.
- A directory structure that makes sense to you such as:
''' Job or location or person or event or project
''' Photographer if there are multiple
''' ...
The key point is that it must make sense to you. When I see the photo in the directory: C:\PHOTOS\PLACES\NEWYORK\NY-20071206-0124.CR2 This New York photo taken on 6-Dec-2007 shot in Raw mode.
You will still need some software to find/retrieve your photos according to ratings/keywords/iptc...
1 DAM ↑
2 1000 terabytes ↑
DAM and Buckets
Peter Krogh wrote a book: The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers published by O'Reilly in 2005. It's a very interesting book. Digital Asset Management1 become very important once we switched from analog/film based photos to digitally based photos.
The book tries to answer the basic question of how to store the photos and how to make it so you can find and retrieve the photos.
Buckets
One of the core tenets is that you store your data into buckets, and these buckets should be the size of the media you use for backup. At the time (2003 & 2004), the backup medium was mostly CD/DVDs. One of his proposed solutions was to use the naming of the buckets by date and the bucket either is 800Mb for CDs or 4.2Gb for the DVDs. Cataloging software would keep track of in which bucket is each photo. I don't like the concept of the bucket.
Digital Photos
- Stop thinking of photos
- Start thinking files
In a digital world, there is photos do not exists, only files. These files represent photos. How to you store your Word documents? In buckets? I don't, do you? I doubt it.
Either you can store your digital files either in:
- A database: databases can be extremely, very, very, very... large in the petabytes2 size.
- A directory structure that makes sense to you such as:
''' Job or location or person or event or project ''' Photographer if there are multiple ''' ... The key point is that it must make sense to you. When I see the photo in the directory: C:\PHOTOS\PLACES\NEWYORK\NY-20071206-0124.CR2 This New York photo taken on 6-Dec-2007 shot in Raw mode.
You will still need some software to find/retrieve your photos according to ratings/keywords/iptc...
1 DAM ↑
2 1000 terabytes ↑
