Digital Asset Management, Part 1 - Storing Your Images

Introduction

Managing digital photos once you've taken them can be a daunting task. The temptation with digital to keep snapping away means that you inevitably end up with far more images than you would with film. On the positive side, with a bit of careful planning, they are easier to manage, store and maintain than the tradition box of transparancies.

I've assumed in this article that you're reasonably familiar with both your computer and camera, and are now looking for practical strategies to deal with the complexities of handling large numbers of big files. Feel free to get in touch if you've got any questions about what I'm saying here.

File Naming Strategy

For now, I'm not going to talk about categorising, keywording or otherwise organising your images, I'm just going to talk about 'best practices' when storing them on your computer. The first thing to do is to set your camera to use continual numbering - that is, it doesn't re-set the image count every time you put in a fresh memory card. So far so good - most cameras will number the images using four digits, so this gives you a full 10,000 photos before you start duplicating your filenames. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't - you'll be surprised how quickly that 9999 comes up! Some image downloaders (perhaps even the software that came with your camera) will re-number the photos for you automatically as they are copied from the camera, with 5,6 or more digits, and if you use software like this already as part of your digital workflow it's definitely worth using this feature. But if, like me, you simply use Windows Explorer (or whatever the Mac equivalent is) to copy your images using a card reader, then this step fits in much less neatly to your digital workflow. There are several bits of software you can use to renumber your images after you've copied them - Windows XP has a feature similar to this built in, and the excellent IrfanView (of which more later) will also do it for you - but I would argue that it's not strictly necessary. If you use a sensible directory structure, coupled with a good keywording strategy, I don't believe that the time it takes to do this renaming is well spent. My advice (and plenty of others disagree) is to just leave the files with the default camera name and instead use a sensible directory structure to organise them. Leading me conveniently on to ...

Directory Structure

In a very real sense, the physical structure of the folders on your disk drive is not of great importance - as long as it's logical, and allows you to find the images you're looking for on the infrequent occasions you need to track them down using Windows Explorer. Far more often you'll be selecting and manipulating images from within your keywording program (of which more anon), or using Windows Search to look for the filename. For me, the most logical directory structure is one based on dates, specifically the YYYY-MM-DD (e.g. 2006-09-24) format outlined in the ISO 8601 standard. As the standard says, "it is the only format which natively lexicographically sorts chronologically" - i.e. it appears in date order correctly in your file manager. Depending on how you work, you could also tag the folders with some kind of useful identifier - "2006-09-12 Botswana Safari". As long as the date part comes first, in the correct format, the folders will still list logically in your file manager and you'll have a lot less trouble managing your images.

Weeding your images

Many of the photos you take will be rubbish. Hopefully as you improve, the proportion of rubbish ones gets less, but still, many of the photos you take will be rubbish :-) What's needed is a fast and easy way of going through the images and deleting the ones you no longer want to keep. Once I've copied the images to my computer, I use a two-pass strategy - a quick-and-dirty first look, where I delete all the really obvious rubbish, and then a second, longer look to try and identify which photos are really worth keeping. For the first pass, I use IrfanView, a lightweight (and free!) image viewer which will extract the jpgs hidden inside raw files for most major camera manufacturers (see supported formats and the plugins page). I like this because it is so simple - it does exactly what it says on the tin, with none of the useless 'features' associated with other image viewers. It also runs well on my ultraportable laptop or any older computers you may have to use while travelling. (You can also use IrfanView to renumber your images, if you want to - click 'File - Batch Rename' and follow the simple instructions). Once I've got rid of the obvious junk, I usually wait until I get home in front of my main machine and take a more serious look at what's left, using my raw converter program (again, of which more anon) to really examine the detail and colours.

Where to store your images?

The short and somewhat fatuous answer is, "on a very big hard drive", but with storage prices dropping all the time, I beleive this is the best solution. At the time of writing in late 2006, you can pick up a 250Gb hard drive for £65 or so; with a couple of these in your computer, you're talking some fairly serious storage, even with the larger file sizes of top-end digital cameras. For instance, a Canon 1Ds MkII uses 15Mb for every raw file, plus another 50Mb or so if you're saving processed tifs as well. So you can get about 4000 images on a single, £65 hard drive. If you've really got some serious data to store and you're running out of space in your computer for new hard drives, then you should look at Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, such as this one. It's basically a box with hard drives in, which sits somewhere on your computer network and lets you store massive amounts of data on it. It's a very easy way to add large amounts of storage to your home or office network - if you managed to set up your broadband router, then you should be OK with this.
With all these relatively cheap options available, traditional storage methods such as tapes or large piles of CD- or DVD-ROMs don't seem that attractive to me. Much better to have all your images "online" at all times.

Where else to store your images?

Ah yes, the dreaded topic of 'backup'. Honestly, how many of you really have a proper backup strategy? In part two of this article, I'll make some practical suggestions on how to back up your photos in a flexible, robust and above all, automated way.