In today’s quick photography tip we are going to explore the best methods for the image database management, kindly provided by NY’s Photographer David Bergman and his show on AdoramaTV.
David explains: “Do you how I manage my images after a shoot so that I can find them in the future? There are different ways to do this and I’m not saying this is the only way, or even the best way but it’s worked for me for many years.”
“On any particular assignment I might shoot thousands of photos. Before I copy all of those images into my computer, I’m gonna create a single master folder and name it with an eight-digit number that represents the date of the shoot – a year, the month, and the day, and then something descriptive about the assignment.”
“I do it that way, so when I have a long list of folders on my hard drive, they’ll all sort automatically in inside that master folder. Then I create all the subfolders. I’m gonna need a “raw” folder and a “selects” folder. Inside “selects” I create two subfolders – “raw first edit” and “raw final”. I might have more folders in there depending on the assignment.”
“it will start with that for now I can copy all of my images into that raw folder and I use photo mechanic to go through them very quickly. I’m gonna do multiple passes here so I don’t spend a lot of time comparing one frame. I’m just looking for anything decent, and if I can get it down to two or three hundred images, I’ll copy those into the “raw first edit” folder I created earlier, and then repeat that process with those images.”
“And this is where I’m gonna make my critical final selections. Hopefully getting it down to thirty or forty frames – I copy those into my “raw finals” folder, and those are the only images I’m gonna bring into my RAW processing folder to work on for final publication. At the end of this process I have a single tidy folder with all of my images. If I need to find something in the future I can search for it by date or assignment, and then go into the “raw finals” folder to find my best images.”
“If I need to find something else, I can always go into that “raw first edit” folder and look for more images from the shoot.”