The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers

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Chapter 7, Using Cataloging Software

The Catalog Sets to Metadata script

(the dialog box for which is shown

in Figure 7-20) will convert the pri-

vate metadata contained in cata-

log sets into embedded metadata in

one of several IPTC fields. You can

also choose to include the entire

folder structure of the sets (the

parent containers), if that informa-

tion is helpful. The last command,

Synchronize, exports the annota-

tions from the catalog document

into the IPTC fields of the files

themselves. The script is available at

http://www.theDAMbook.com.

Cataloging Software and

Other Types of Digital Media

Files

As more of the media that you buy,

use, and save moves to digital for-

mat, you will increasingly face the same problems with these media files

that you do with digital photographs. You need to be able to organize and

store the files, back them up, check for duplicates, migrate them when nec-

essary, and —oh, yeah—use them.

The same systems that you put in place for your photos can be applied to

your PDF files, your InDesign or Quark documents, your fonts, your audio

files, your home movie files, and even your collection of commercially pro-

duced movies or saved TiVo recordings. Each of these files has a data stor-

age component and a content management component. The bucket system

and cataloging software can help you address these challenges.

For instance, I keep my InDesign documents (which I mostly use for portfo-

lio layout) in the same information structure that I use for processed images.

This has the advantage of keeping the relative paths constant, so that the

InDesign document can see the image files it’s linking to. I can catalog these

files in iView and work with them seamlessly along with my images.

I also use the same structure and tools to store my home video files, as you

can see in Figure 7-21. I typically shoot videos with a small consumer Sony

digital camera, so these video files are in the same pipeline as my snapshot

photos right from the start. iView can handle these exactly as it does imag-

es, which has made my home videos both more secure and more accessible.

(Keep in mind that if you use a DV camera, you can generate lots of data

Other DAM Stuff

Figure 7-20. The dialog box for Daniel

Robillard’s Catalog Sets to Metadata script,

which converts private metadata into

embedded metadata.

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