Indexing pictures

Posted on January 3rd, 2006 by Sacha Chua

Adphoto is an advertising photography
and digital imaging company. My parents established it 33 years ago.
It’s Good Stuff.

We’d like to develop the stock photography side of our business. For
that, we need the ability to search for images and give clients
thumbnails before pulling out the original images from our archives.
The Digital Asset Management for Photographers book recommended a hard-disk based archive, but I wanted to make something work without disrupting the office (or my spare time) too much. =)

Right now, we use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to keep track of CDs
and their contents. Our digital librarian is in charge of assigning
numbers to CDs and describing the contents of the CD using keywords
and phrases. When someone asks for stock shots with a certain keyword,
she searches her Excel file and then physically retrieves the CDs in
order to make thumbnails. Our previous digital librarian started
filing copies of pictures in a directory tree arranged by subject, but
this was not accompanied by metadata, and it was hard to keep up to
date.

Our librarian has been experimenting with iView Media Pro and
Extensis Portfolio. After some poking
around, I found out how to do offline indexing in Extensis Portfolio.
That would allow us to index thousands and thousands of CDs while
keeping thumbnails on the hard drive. iView also has this feature, so
we just need to play around with it and see which interface we like
best.

My Adphoto goals for the next two weeks (I have to go back to
Canada in two weeks!) are to:

Improve and document the workflow for digital images
Transfer the website to another host (must meet Luis Buenaventura)
Contract out the redesign of the website and the development of a Flash portfolio viewer
(might be able to do the Flash portfolio viewer myself if I can find a good photoblog script)

Improving the workflow would include:

File and folder naming conventions to support quick indexing and retrieval
How to index images
How to retrieve images for comps
How to retrieve images for use

This will be fun. Hectic, but fun.

On Technorati: adphoto, metadata, dam, stock

More posts about: adphoto, dam, metadata, stock // Add Comment »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/3222

On This Day...

2013: Web app idea: Stamp mix calculator — I’ve resolved to send more paper letters. I also have an odd mix of stamps that I want to use [...]
2013: Sketching twelve business ideas — In Running Lean, Ash Maurya recommends that you document your “Plan A”s – sketch out many possible businesses and business [...]
2012: CSS theming, magnification, and foot pedals — I’m working on the stylesheets for a site, which means lots of fiddly little changes. I decided to make [...]
2011: Momentum and holidays — Monday: I don’t do “relaxing holidays” very well. My idea of a perfect holiday is one where I’m all wrung [...]
2010: Thinking out loud: Mapping what I know — I want to map what I know. I want to make what I know more findable. The reverse-chronological order of blog [...]
2009: There are no words to describe the geeky awesomeness of this — Update: Turns out the guy was lipsynching Moosebutter, but it’s still awesome! (found it on Jeff Waugh‘s blog while reading his [...]
2009: Annual letter: the numbers — I sent out 205 hand-personalized yearly updates in my initial set of holiday greetings. I’ve received 60 replies so far, [...]
2009: Ideas for improving my website — Add a section about my speaking topics and events Switch to Drupal and customize it Restore the Feedburner widget that shows how [...]
2009: Ideas for becoming a better networker — Load contact information onto my iPod Touch in a way that I can easily search Explore using a system like SugarCRM Add [...]
2005: Excellent newbie guide for Planner — Clair Ching has posted a wonderful guide to Planner, complete with screenshots. Check out the following links: - http://eclair.bizhat.com/emacs/plannernewbie.html - http://eclair.bizhat.com/emacs/plannerscreen1.html - http://eclair.bizhat.com/emacs/plannerscreen2.html On Technorati: [...]
2005: Mandrake translations — Thanks to pusakat for telling me about the Mandrake Linux Tagalog Translation Team. Amazing stuff. http://www.mandrakelinux.com/l10n/tl.php3 On Technorati: opensource, tagalog, filipino, localization
2005: So far: contrast with strangeness — GK Chesterton seems a little too weirded out by the East. I suppose ‘Orientals’ really were strange and unfamiliar, almost alien, [...]

sacha chua living an awesome life