Canon® EOS Digital Photography Photo Workshop

9.3. MANAGING AND ARCHIVING PHOTOS

Once you've transferred your images safely to your digital studio, you need to process and permanently archive them before you begin any editing or fulfillment. You want to keep your images in as pristine a condition as possible — meaning that master images should not be multiple-generations old (especially true for JPEG files) or altered from their original state, for example, and they should not be cropped, color-corrected, or otherwise edited or changed. Furthermore, you will want to name the image files in a way that will let you identify details about the photos, access them, and relate them to further generations of the same image.

There are many applications and methods for managing and archiving images, also known as DAM, or Digital Asset Management. Canon's Digital Photo Professional is a mid-range DAM product, allowing you to accomplish many archival and management capabilities.

9.3.1. MANAGING IMAGES

The problem with digital photos is that it is easy to reproduce them quickly and prolifically, almost to the point that without management, you may have a hard time telling which photo is an original and which is a copy. And, for JPEG images, the more times an image is opened and resaved, the further it degrades in quality because it is a lossy format (one that loses quality over multiple generations). Consequently, it behooves you to manage your images as soon as possible after you have downloaded them to the computer.

Renaming is a ...