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META machine take command of your keywording - part 5 of 1 2 3 4 5

by Dave Wall Published 01/08/2013

DAM - Mike's Bit

Dave Wall's accompanying article set your editor thinking about other programs that are available for digital asset management (DAM). The go-to program for handling professional levels of digital assets is Extensis Portfolio. This is a mature program that has been stable at version 8.5 for some years (with updates for new Raw files, as needed). The forte of the program is its handling of metadata, for it is taken as a given that any extensive database of images will be key worded. The important commercial point is that if an image cannot be located on your system you might as well not have it, and if you don't have it you cannot sell it! Now in some instances the search facilities provided by Windows Explorer are adequate, especially if your file-folder naming is intelligent (e.g. 20100621_SonyaandTonySoprano). Now if Mrs Soprano phones for a wedding image, all you are faced with is sifting through a few hundred images in a single folder - not too onerous!

But what if a contributor to Professional Imagemaker phones up and asks about a logo you did for a feature about them at some date gone by (and they never know exactly when it was!)? Now we have (currently) 184,000 JPEGs and TIFF files on our system and we mainly shoot Raw! This is a bit of a task to visually search!

Fortunately Portfolio adds the file system tree to the keywords so we can satisfy Mrs Soprano but we can also look for specific topics and titles. In the example shown we searched 'canvas' and pulled 133 images into the gallery for looking through in under two seconds. Portfolio also gets around the problem that Windows Explorer does not show thumbnails for either Raw or psd files. In total our system currently has 602,000 files across 25,000 folders - just the cataloguing process took three whole days, day and night for a machine with eight CPUs.

So, given that we have followed Dave's advice and key worded our images Portfolio takes us to a higher level of search capability and this is but a fraction of what Portfolio can do. Look out for a full review in the next issue.

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Contact Dave Wall

1st Published 01/08/2013
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:24

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