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.