Digital Asset Management

I suppose I am up to the 10-12 mark. My trouble is that I am probably inconsistent with words used to describe the same thing. Ie if similar photos are added with sometime between them, I have forgotten what description I called something the first time around!

(Should have added in my earlier post that I use LR for pixel-peeping comparisons between photos and for processing as it is better for that than ACDSee)

Andy

Adobe Bridge for me - but just because it was bundled with CS4.

I use star rating but no tags - I gulp at the thought of working through each photo.

A free alternative is Resource Space. It's a web based application so IT types, OK with running Apache, PHP, MySQL on their desktop, may find it useful.

Lightroom for me too. I have too many digitally archived pics going back to 2005 without tags that I need to find time to correctly tag. Then it will be brilliant. Luckily I have a good memory and can find much of what I need when I need it. Truth is I don't need the old stuff much. Like all the 1000s of mounted slides I have! Sometimes taking as many pictures as we do causes us file archiving headaches...but it's enjoyable at the time.

I had a good program called iView which was more or less perfect. Unfortunately, iView sold out to Microsoft who have effectively tripled the price and sidelined it.

My legacy version gets left behind by all the new, silly, proprietary RAW formats.

You could drag and drop multiple images onto a keyword, all kinds of useful functions and much more logical to use than Bridge (for my taste), which seems to have an unnecessarily complex and muddled interface. And, of course, not all software interprets IPTC tags in the same way.

Like Peter, one day I will have all my stuff archived and findable in a few seconds. Honest!

Another vote for IDimager, simply the best DAM program available and I've tried most of them! AFAIK it's the only one that properly implements true versioning, very good review here:
http://www.damroundup.com/2008/05/12/review-idimager-v40/

and a comparison chart:
http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/flow-catalog-compare.html

Hi Martin,
I looked into this a while ago after wondering how on earth I was going to keep track of my ever growing no. of pics, and after hunting around decided on photools iMatch. Small company but active user forum and the developer isn't afraid to answer queries himself.

I find the iMatch dynamic category approach very useful and I can find things pretty quickly, IMHO it does help reduce the organisation effort and you can easily restructure your approach if you wish. You can do your file management from within iMatch, and because of the categories approach you're not straightjacketed by the physical organisation of image files within windows folders. Batch file renaming is pretty straightforward.

one advantage is that you can keep small cached versions of you pics in it and then continue working on the database even if the pics are on DVD or another machine, which I like. You can also easily copy the database from PC to laptop and add pics whilst on holiday or on location for example.

I've got about 6000 images loaded up and it's not slowing down.

drag and drop from iMatch into silkypix for editing is a doddle.

I haven't decided on my best approach to keywording yet but that's a personal thing, not something to do with the tool.

The database querying is pretty powerful, just specify the filter you want, or just drag categories into a query builder, you can generate webpages with it too which I like. There's even a 'find images like' feature (including finding pics from a hand-drawn sketch - which more for fun than serious use I think !!)

There is no built in versioning support, however some users have set up some scripts to do this, based on using sensibly structured image filenames. The user forum can assist you I'm sure.

My feeling is that to get the best out of it some IT or software or database familiarity is an advantage, but it's not essential.

Like most DAM tools I've looked at you do need to put some thought into how you want to use it, probably best to set up a small test database, experiment and play with that before loading all your images in !!

worth a look IMO :- http://www.photools.com/imoverview.php

I try to keep it simple - the Photoshop Elements comes with an excellent Organizer, which also includes a picture downloader starting automatically when I connect my camera.

Agreed, iView was great. One of the best things about it was that the library file (containing all the thumbnails) could be on your local hard drive, while the actual photos could be on a network share. Really great for laptops. I used to work at a place where we used to it catalog all of the stock photography CDs, a couple hundred gigs of stock produced an approx 1 gig library file.

Then MS bought it and ruined it (as usual).