Here’s the problem.

I just got back from shooting. I may have been on a commercial assignment, on vacation, I may have simply been walking the dog with my camera in hand. Invariably I come back with a pile of images that I have ideas for, and often those are a whole range of ideas, and a whole bunch of uses for a single image.

How do I sort, categorize, use and re-use each image so that I’m organized, I protect the original files, and I know what I’m doing to which files? The issue is not really an issue of asset management. It’s an issue of project management.

Essentially, I’ve taken all these images and I have in the back of my mind several purposes for them, several projects. Let’s say I want to work on my upcoming show, my portfolio, a stock request from a client, and a book cover. I have one digital asset, and 5 projects.

Where do I file them?

In the old days, shooting film, I had a really simple system for cataloging and filing my images. You could call me and ask for a shot we did two years ago and I could put my hands on it within minutes. That is, unless I’d used it in my portfolio… or my website. Then, I’ve got to ask myself if I’d filed it in the “portfolio” folder, or somewhere else. My solution was to put all those chromes into a basket on my worktable called “active projects”, and eventually get around to filing them back in the client folders after I’d done everything I needed to do with them.

Let’s just say they’re still waiting to be filed.

In the next few entries I'm going to explain how to use the powerful tools of data management to track, organize and protect not only your digital assets, (your photographic images), but to organize your uses for those assets: your photographic projects.

-Ted Dillard

(Excertped from the draft "Photographic Project Management:
Data Management Solutions for Photography Projects)