I love making photographs, I dislike filing and cataloguing but I really hate it when I know I have a particular shot – and I just can’t find it!
In the ‘old days’ a trannie would be put in a sleeve and filed on a hanger in a filing cabinet draw. You would probably group together geographic locations like NSW or Melbourne. The really diligent might have a proper register and of course the Image Libraries would have very sophisticated filing, numbering and keyword systems since their business depended on finding any particular image quickly.
Physical filing is not too much of a problem for small collections, it might take a while to find an image but you know more or less where to look.
Digital collections are harder to deal with since there is no easy visual way of trawling through thousands of images one at a time, even the default file names leave no clue - _L8S3298.CR2 is not exactly user friendly.
The term Digital Asset Manager (DAM) is a new buzzword but one that will become more and more familiar as we photographers amass bigger and bigger digital image collections (or scans) and have to organise them. Filing, sorting and organising is something that computers are very good at, as long as they are given the right information in the first place. Fortunately for us the new version of Photoshop, CS2, includes Bridge which has some useful tools built in which I have incorporated into my own archiving workflow.
We Need a System
A good archiving system is a lot more that just a place to put files. Done properly it can incorporate the whole workflow from Flash Card and RAW conversion right up to online and offline backups, with a decent retrieval and preview system built in. The best systems are simple and easy – if it is too hard or complex it simply will not get used – so my suggestions are based on the KISS (Keep It Simple Sweetheart) principle.
Briefly, what we will achieve is this:
1. Start with RAW files on a CF Card.
2. Copy them to the main computer.
3. Convert them all to Digital Negative (DNG) format for archiving.
4. Copy to online storage and offline backup.
5. Catalogue all the files into a master database.
Hardware – the more Storage the Better
OK, you need somewhere to put the files. Pretty obvious really, on the hard drive of your computer should be OK, or will it?
Yes, maybe, but what if that disk goes wrong? Or you run out of room? The key is planning for the future and setting up a system which is expandable or ‘scalable’.
So what does this mean? Well, firstly it is not a good idea to use your single hard drive for storage except in the very short term. The optimum set up is to have one physical hard drive for the Operating System, one for Photoshop to use as a temporary scratch disc and one or more for image storage – that’s 3 physical drives.
You also ideally need a DVD burner and either a caddy mounted 80Gb (or more) hard drive or a similar Firewire/USB external hard drive. I’ll explain why in a moment.
The set up might be something like this:
C: Drive – System
D: Drive – Photoshop Scratch
E: Storage
F: External Harddrive with empty folders named DVD1, DVD2 etc
G: DVD Burner
Software - Adobe Bridge
If you are familiar with Photoshop CS you will remember the File Browser, well Bridge is a grown-up version of that, a stand alone application with muscles. You don’t even need Photoshop open to use it.
Bridge is many things but there are 3 features which are crucial to workflow and archiving.
Firstly, when Bridge previews a file of any kind to give you a decent thumbnail it writes the preview data to a cache so that you don’t need to repeat the operation each time you open a folder. This cache can be centralised (default) or ‘distributed’ which means it lives in the folder containing the previewed image files. If you copy or move this folder the cache goes with it and Bridge can refer to it wherever the folder ends up – like on a DVD.
Secondly, if you open a RAW file and make adjustments, these adjustments are recorded in a little data file called a Sidecar file. When you process the RAW image these settings control how Adobe Camera RAW (ACR3) makes the conversion and they are saved alongside the RAW file so the RAW file itself never needs to be altered.
Lastly, Bridge and ACR can save RAW files as Digital Negative (DNG) files. This is ‘A Good Thing’ because not only is DNG an open non-proprietary standard but also because it can include the little Sidecar file from ACR3. This is important, as we shall see.
Workflow – putting it all together
This is my own workflow, it might not suit you precisely, but the principles are much the same for everyone, so use the bits that work for you and modify the rest. I will go into detail about each step later.
1. Copy files from CF Card to an appropriately named folder on the Storage hard drive, in this case E: Drive.
2. Convert to DNG Format using the free Adobe DNG Converter 3.1 that ships with CS2 or can be downloaded for free. Save the files onto your External hard drive into a series of pre-defined folders called DVD1, 2, 3 etc.
3. Point Bridge to this new folder and allow it time to create thumbnails and preview all the files.
4. Burn to DVD as accumulated folders add up to about 4.7Gb, or one DVD.
5. Use a 3rd Party archive package like IMatch, Portfolio or Iview Media Pro to process all the DNG file on the external hard drive (HD), generating a master archive of thumbs with full keyword and/or category facilities.
Some of the above steps need a bit of explaining as to why they are needed. The main point here is this sequence has to be done once only and then you open up some very neat workflow possibilities which can save a lot of time later, as you will see.
1. Copy Files
Pretty self explanatory. it is good practice to never work off the CF card directly but to copy to your hard drive. Not only is the HD much quicker to work off, but the data is in effect immediately backed up.
I tend to copy into a folder named something appropriate to the shoot, like ‘Tasmania 2005’. Use sub folders if you like.
2. Convert to DNG
Digital Negative (DNG) format is a new initiative by Adobe to future-proof your RAW files by using an open-source format to encode the RAW files from any camera. DNG is a topic for another time, but it does include 2 other neat features which make it perfect as an archive format.
Firstly DNG files include a preview JPEG which Bridge can process quickly so the thumbnailing and previewing times are short.
Secondly, DNG files include the Sidecar file that we mentioned earlier. Every time you open a DNG file, the RAW settings you that you choose are stored within it, and what’s more, the previews of that file in Bridge are updated as well.
As an archive fomat this makes DNG perfect since there is only one file to store, no more little Sidecar files floating about. So convert to DNG as a first step and save time in the future.
I convert the RAW files into a series of pre-set folders on the external hard drive. Each folder is called DVD1, DVD2 and so on.
At this point each file can be automatically renamed to something more meaningful. I like to include the original file number from the camera but you can make up your own naming system to suit your own needs. DNG Converter has some useful renaming tools, although you can easily do this step later in Bridge which is a bit more sophisticated.
3. Using Bridge.
Check that the preferences are set to “Use Distributed Cache where possible”. This means that the cached thumbnails and previews will be saved to the same folder as the images.
Point Bridge at the folder to which you saved the DNG files. You can in fact do steps 2 and 3 concurrently, start the DNG converter running and then direct Bridge to the new folder empty folder. As DNG files are saved into the folder, Bridge will preview them. I timed this and it took slightly longer than the two operations on their own, but the advantage of this method is that you can walk away and come back a few minutes later with it all done.
A folder of 82 D60 CRW files took 7 mins to convert and preview this way. Not bad really especially when you think that the new DNG file folder will never need it’s preview cache built again.
You will see two new files in the new folder: Adobe Bridge Cache.bc and Adobe Bridge Cache.bct. These contain the cache information and if they travel with the folder.
TIP: Use Bridge to edit the ITPC and EXIF info to include useful copyright and keyword information. This will pay dividends later in Step 5.
4. As you add to each external hard drive folder, keep an eye on the space it takes up. When it gets to about 4.7Gb burn the whole folder to a real DVD using the same label as a title.
In this way you build up an on-line archive of all your DNG RAW files, all previewed and cached as well as an off-line archive of exactly the same previewed and cached files. Store these DVDs somewhere safe and you now have a neat double-redundant archive with the most recent 80Gb (or more) available on-line.
If the external HD gets full, buy another and continue the sequence. You can stash the first one somewhere safe or just leave it plugged in.
5. Use a 3rd party catalogue package to create a searchable database of images from your on-line archive.
Bridge is cool, but it is not a very good asset manager in itself. If you use its search facilities to ‘Find’ a particular file by an assigned ITPC keyword it will have to search the whole archive of files. This can be very slow.
The best way to complete your archive is to invest in something like IView MediaPro, which is my preferred D.A.M. these days. It takes a collection of files, build a set of small thumbnails and store them in a searchable database. You can assign images to any number of different categories in a very easy way and this makes finding image an absolute snap. I will look at these packages in another article but in general they are all pretty good, although some have not caught up fully with DNG files.
End result: All your RAW files converted to DNG, previewed, cached and safely archived to both DVD and external hard drive. Plus, now you can find any image in you collection by category or keyword (or anything else) and you will be able to convert your RAW files into useful images even if the original proprietary format is obsolete.
I know it sounds like a lot of extra work but in reality it is fairly quick, certainly not much slower than using Bridge on it’s own. What extra time you do invest now will be more than repaid in the future in both speed of retrieval and, pricelessly, in the security of your irreplaceable images.
Nick Rains 2006
ps Buy IView by clicking on the above graphic and get a 15% discount off the normal price!
