Where to start?

[IndoMK]

I have three and a half years of photos I'm trying to tag/work through, and I was wondering if anyone could give me some ideas of where to start. I feel very overwhelmed by the project, which is probably why I've avoided tackling it for almost a year now!

 

They're organized in folder structure by year, month, and occasion; so I don't think there's anything to be done there. I've created a Daminion catalogue for each year (2008 through 2011), and imported my images. Where do I start next?

 

Should I start with my oldest pictures first, or the newest? Premake a bunch of location and category tags, or do it as I need them? Completely tag a bunch of pictures before moving on to some more? Or go through a year and add basic location information, and then go back through to detail it a bit more, and then move on to another type of tagging? (Sorry if I'm using the completely wrong terminology, I don't have the program open to double-check myself.)

 

Please, someone at least give me an idea of where and how to start??

[franky68]

The best way to start something is always to do the first step ;)

 

Seriously you have enough images to catalog that you will develop your own prefered way to do this. As I was starting to catalog my images I was working them down by folders. I always quickly selected a screenfull of thumbnails that belonged to one category and dragged them onto that particular keyword. Then I scrolled down and did the same until I reached the end of the folder. This was when I started with the next keyword until I found that I tagged them well enough.

 

Another thing: I would not suggest splitting your images into different catalogs by year unless you have a really good reason to do this. You probably do not want to search through multiple catalogs later when you are looking for a particular image.

 

Different catalogs usually are meant to catalog different things - like Movies and Images or general images vs. rather private ones or stock images vs. projects.

 

Good luck and just start

[pgrondin]

I am working my way through my collection of 30,000 or so photos. On disk, they are generally organized by year, and either month or occasion. I have only been using this program for a month or so. I'm still just learning how to do this as well.

 

I would agree with Franky68, in recommending a single catalog. I would think you want to be able to enter a search and find all the related photos in your collection. That is the real power of Daminion.

 

With a single catalog, and one search, I can find all the photos of my dog taken over a period of 5 years, or find all the photos of Nancy taken in 2003, 2004 or 2005, or all the photos of war memorials taken in France or Italy.

 

I tend to work in large directories. In Thumbnail View I review my photos, and select all the photos for a given tag. I then right click on the tag and "Add (tag) to selected files". I dislike having to fix the consequences of inadvertently dropping files in the wrong place.

 

If you know more or less exactly what you want for a tagging scheme, I would definitely recommend that you set up your tags / nesting before you start applying tags to your photos. That encourages you to restrict the tag vocabulary. In my case, my tagging is an ever growing jumble of tags, since I create new tags as I come across photos I want to be able to find that don't fit the existing tags. That is what happens when you just let it grow organically. At some point in the future I will have to refine the list in a more organized fashion and re-tag. With Daminion's ability to search / filter, it should not be too difficult to select all the photos with the "old" tag, remove it, and add the "new" tag.

 

The purpose of this tagging, for me, is to be able to find photos. This does not in general have to be precise. If the tag search returns less than 100 or so photos, I can quickly scan them and find the photo I am looking for. So, as a recommendation on how to start, I would suggest that, for every photo, you apply one or two tags so that every photo can be "found", and then add more precise tags in the future if required to reduce the size of the sets of photos returned by your searches.

[IndoMK]

I had assumed that a single catalog of over 40,000 images would be too large for Daminion to handle gracefully, but if it can, I'd much rather go that route, it would definitely be easier to find pictures that I'm not sure of year taken. I don't suppose there's a way to simply merge catalogs though, rather than having to reimport everything?

 

I do know roughly what tags I'll need - places, events, etc; so I think I'll fight the urge to be perfectionist, and just create some basics beforehand.

 

Could someone explain the differences between categories, keywords, and collections? Places, events, and people are pretty self-explanatory. But the rest seem kind of repetitive. Are categories more broad than keywords? Like "Beach" versus "shells"? Which should I use?

 

Thanks both of you. A little encouragement and pointers is enough to make me think that maybe I can take the plunge and actually get this done. :)

[franky68]

I had assumed that a single catalog of over 40,000 images would be too large for Daminion to handle gracefully,

 

I havent tested Daminion with those amounts of images yet nor am I part of the dev team. But Id be seriously dissapointed if a few hundred thousand images would cause any problems. Daminion stores its data in an SQL database which are meant to store large numbers of datasets.

 

Could someone explain the differences between categories, keywords, and collections?

 

Imagion a collection as a shoebox. You have one with your portfolios with model shootings, one with all images you want to be printed out once you get uptown etc. So they are not to keyword or categorize images but to collect them outside your organisation structure.

 

Categories however depend a bit on what youre doing. I personally have categories for "Macro", "Portrait", "Landscape", "Snapshoot" and so on. This doesnt really describe whats in the image but more their style. But others might use this for different purposes.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Frank

[vinc]

Hello

if the tool works like the IPTC Standard, have a look at this Page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTC_Information_Interchange_Model

As i know, Keywords are part of IPTC - so would/should work with Other Agent or Tools

As i know, Katecories are more fore your database to find it

and a Collection

Imagine, you would like to put all your Red Flowers together make a collection!

I use the collection - some customers come and ask for something - i do a collection and them i put it on a directory on a homepage - and he may have a quick look

 

have a nice day

and much fun with your archive

 

vincent

[IndoMK]

Imagion a collection as a shoebox. You have one with your portfolios with model shootings, one with all images you want to be printed out once you get uptown etc. So they are not to keyword or categorize images but to collect them outside your organisation structure.

 

Categories however depend a bit on what youre doing. I personally have categories for "Macro", "Portrait", "Landscape", "Snapshoot" and so on. This doesnt really describe whats in the image but more their style. But others might use this for different purposes.

 

Hope this helps.

Yep, helps a lot! Thanks! :)