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Teaching Photographers to Protect the Assets they Love
By Kevin Ames
"Workflow has become such a ubiquitous term, that some might find it off-putting," says commercial photographer, workflow expert and digital asset management (DAM) educator Kevin Ames."Whatever you call it, photographers benefit from practicing a consistent set of procedures to manage their photographs - especially in the digital world."
The old adage, 'if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there' can and will get you to interesting places. Such an approach when working with original digital negatives is risky, says Ames. The greatest danger is lost files whether because they're misplaced on hard drives or DVDs or because the hard drive itself fails before the images are safely stored on non-volatile media like optical discs.
Ames recommends two key steps that will keep you safe from those 'interesting' destinations of lost, or ever worse irretrievable data. First, create a digital archive, using both hard drives and permanent copies on DVDs. Second, develop a process by which you can quickly find and access the images in that archive at any time; no matter if the image is a RAW digital negative or a layered Photoshop document (PSD) several megabytes in size.
"People truly remember only emotionally significant things. Everything else can and will quickly pass from memory," says Kevin. "That's why it's critical to get digital negatives named properly with metadata added to support detailed searches on permanent media (such as CDs, DVDs) as soon as possible. That's also why cataloging is so important."
The hardest part of developing an effective workflow, Ames says, is simply getting started. His message to students is encouraging: "Developing your workflow is never going to be more difficult than it is right this moment. It is only going to get easier. Having a scalable set of steps in place to take advantage of software advances and new media mean workflow will get faster and simpler over time."
In his workshops he encourages photographers to develop a method that works for them that includes these twelve steps of a best practices camera-to-archive-to-showing photography to a client workflow.
- Use 4GB Lexar Professional Compact Flash cards - that volume fits on a single DVD.
- Copy your CompactFlash cards to two external hard drives. One is the digital negative 'working' or
'online' hard drive. The other is a temporary backup. I use Photo Mechanic and Lexar Stackable Card
Readershttp://www.lexar.com/digfilm/cf_udma.html for this step. The combination of Photo Mechanic and the stackable readers allows up to
four Lexar CompactFlash or other CompactFlash cards to be copied to both drive in one operation.
You can download it from www.camerabits.com.
- Name images with sequential serial numbers, so if something is accidentally deleted, it's obvious
and can be easily recovered from your backups.
NOTE: Neither a word-name or a date by itself is a best practice, because you can't know what the next logical name or date
will be. Serialization enables you to organize. I always give any photo I take an event number, which is whatever next
number is available. Then when someone views the proof and requests the shot, I search for it using iView MediaPro,
which tells me the precise location of the original digital negative -- not only on the hard drive but also in which
archived DVD. I open it in Camera RAW, add requested exposure, color or saturation tweaks then edit it in Adobe Photoshop
non-destructively using layers. Ultimately I will have only one PSD file with lots of layers and one flattened TIFF file,
which is the deliverable.
Edited projects are kept on yet another external hard drive in sequentially numbered folders. When a folder reaches four
gigabytes in size, I burn it to a DVD, make a copy of the DVD (sound familiar?) and drag that copy onto the cataloging
window of iView Media Pro. Everything I shoot and digitally edit is kept in one catalog. I can search by the event number,
client name or anything that was added to the metadata field (see the next step). MediaPro keeps it all sorted and tells
me exactly where any of my photographic needles are in this great big digital haystack.
- To facilitate image searching, add descriptive metadata in the IPTC fields of the RAW file using Adobe Bridge or
iView Media Pro.
- Burn the renamed, metadata rich files to a high quality DVD disc.
- Copy the first DVD to a second DVD - disc-to-disc using a second burner.
- Make a full resolution JPEG file or convert the RAW files to DNG from the second DVD to verify that the data on
both DVDs and the hard drive is good.
NOTE: Usually corruption happens while copying images from cards to hard drives. Many software programs allow you to verify
a disk by comparing the disk to the source. If the source is corrupt, software verification will tell you only that you have
a perfect copy of that corruption . So, this verification step - creating actual digital photographs from the copy of the
first DVD - proves that both DVDs and the data on the hard drive itself - is good.
- Once the second DVD is proofed, the backup files on the second hard drive may be erased and the CompactFlash
card can be formatted in the camera.
- Keep one DVD in the studio to serve as a backup for when (not if) the hard drive fails or a folder of digital
negatives is accidentally deleted.
- Keep the other DVD in a secure off-site location, preferably a significant number of feet above sea level
(or the local flood plane) for safekeeping - in case of a studio fire, theft, hurricane or other natural disaster.
- Catalog the JPEG proofs, a product of the renamed, metadata added and enhanced RAW files. I use iView Media Pro.
Because they have the same information in them that was added to the RAW files earlier and they have been color
balanced and exposure enhanced, they are very close to being a finished deliverable. (I use these full camera
resolution JPEGs as proofs to show clients by building websites with iView Media Pro 3, with email-sized PDF
presentations and with custom proof sheets made with Bridge and Photoshop.)
- Finally, periodically duplicate archives because if you don't, either media will become corrupt or technologies will
die and you'll have media no one can read.
As new non-volatile media becomes commonplace, I open my archive discs, copy them to a hard drive in folders as large as the new media and burn them to it. Then I make a copy and proof the copy. Consistency is essential. Archiving to new ubiquitous media guarantees that you have a fresh copy of your valuable digital negatives and layered Photoshop files. (I know a new media, such as DVD-Blu Ray or DVD-HD, is ubiquitous when I ask my workshop students, "can your computer read ? and every hand goes up.) Another benefit of this process is that you won't have to worry if the newest non-volatile media recorders are backward compatible. (After all someday we aren't going to be able to read CDs. Don't believe it? Do you have any eight tracks in the attic or SyQuest discs lying around for that matter?)
Speaking of archives - I believe that as artists and photographers evolve (and, I suppose, devolve) it's tough to adopt a permanent ranking structure. I find stuff that I wouldn't have seen as a 'good photo' back in the day looks different to me now -I don't throw any photographs away. Ever. You never know where the gold is hidden.
KEVIN's SOFTWARE EQUIPMENT
- Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw
- iView MediaPro
- Photo Mechanic
- Apple OSX
- Windows XP
Kevin Ames Bio
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