Construction equipment

DAM (Digital Asset Management)

DAM is a pain at best of times.
Trying to hammer out workable, reliable and consistent backup schemes, file naming conventions, image workflow, key wording, meta data is not easy.
And as you keep changing things to hopefully simplify your work, you usually ending up with a lot of inconsistencies in the old image archives.

At least until I attended Gavin Gough’s Photo Workflow seminar at Photoshelter and watched his video on Vimo

Conveniently linked for you here:

Workflow changes

The first changes to my workflow include adding a new step to my backup strategy, and completely renaming all my existing image files! Would be a big ouch except it is actually turning out to be a painless process!

Good thing was my existing backup strategy was already good (decades of working as a IT analyst pays off) but even here I added a new step to separately backup all the raw image files automatically as they come in to an external drive using a neat feature of lightroom I did not know even existed!

At the moment all my existing working image files are being renamed to a consistent naming convention (one day at a time, just so I can watch what is happening) and converted to DNG format files.
All being done automatically and being handled by LightRoom itself!
Yes, I did take a full snapshot backup of the entire image library before beginning this process, so reverting in case something “not good” happens would be easy.

This is one eBook package (includes a lot of extra like pre-built Lightroom presets to speed things up) that can really help your workflow especially if you are handling large volumes of image files.

Wish I had found it sooner, going back and converting 10’s of thousands of digital image files to the new consistent workflow format from many years of shooting is going to take a bit of time.

The next step will be to implement the tagging process to keep track of where individual images are within the workflow process.