Hi Claire
No I don't work for adobe, but if you're unsure of what system you may go to in the future, and are working with a limited number of users/images, try using the capabilities built into Adobe Lightroom or Bridge.
Bridge and Lightroom allow the creation of custom templates for metadata input which can be shared between users. These are tick box, thereby eliminating spelling errors.
Metadata standard is XMP so will be compliant with future systems.
The smart collection capability is also useful in that you can create a search criteria within a smart or virtual folder, ie keyword 'marketing' which will populate that virtual folder with all instances that match the criteria.
We have managed to share these folders between users.
My experience other than with dedicated databases like KeMU, which currently is frustrating in it's abilities to show multiple images quickly and in a modern visual way, has been with Bridge.
So Bridge works well locally, slower over networks and if you get into the 10,000s.
Lightroom however stores catalogs of all images that you put through it and of their location regardless of whether you are connected to that location or not.
Lightroom's catalog system should be faster as it stores copies of the thumbnails in the catalog.
You can also reduce the catalog size to speed things up when working with larger numbers of files.
This solution won't be replacement for a dedicated DAM, but if unsure of where you're heading, it will at least future proof your images and provide you with a way of viewing and organising.
Regards
Michael
Sent from my red apple
Hello Clare
We (BMT) are finally getting around to looking at asset management software. My we are looking at Extensis, KeEmu, System Simulation and Asset Bank. Will share our findings later in the spring when decisions have been made.
If for local management of hundreds or several thousand images you could look at Media Pro from Phase One ? It depends on whether or not you need organisation wide asset management or local / individual cataloging. Colleagues in this group will no doubt have a much wider ranging experience than us at this stage.
David Rowan
Hi,
I wondered if people could suggest any reliable archive software for images. We would like to be able to digitally store our images and then have some sort of uncomplicated software that our in-house photography and marketing teams can search and retreive images using keywords.
There are so many systems on the market that it's hard to see which are any good, I'm concerned about buying something that will go out of date and in the future not be useable with different upgrades of Windows.
We are looking at hundreds rather than thousands of high end images at first, but need an archive that can grow as we photograph more.
Is it best to keyword the images using Photoshop and then if the archive software goes out of date and we have to move to another system, we could just transfer the images and data?
Any ideas of where to start would be gratefully received.
Thanks
Claire
