Tag Archives: digital asset management

DAM You, Lightroom!!

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Hi folks:

This is the second of the YouTube videos we did for the Victoria Photography Meetup Group. Since the videos are out in the wild anyway, we thought maybe we should put them up here as well. DAM in this case refers to Digital Asset Management. DAM is probably one of the most underutilized and most important aspects of digital photography. To me it doesn’t matter if you have 500 images or 500,000 images. The question is, how easy is it for you to find the one image you’re looking for? This video covers DAM in an older version of Lightroom, but I don’t think Adobe has changed that aspect of the software. As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below.

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. You can find the rest of our tutorial posts here. We’re closing in on a hundred now, I think.
P.S. II, the sequel. We’ve threatened to do a video on DAM in Capture One as well. To come…

Basic File/Folder Structure in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

I originally wrote this for something else, but thought I’d add it in here as well.  As with many of our tutorial posts, this one’s targeted toward beginners but I thought it might be of use to some…

Part of the challenge of Lightroom file management is understanding that Lightroom is working with your operating system folder structure, so basically Lightroom is showing you a subset of the folders you have on your hard drive – those that you have associated with Lightroom.  Now, Lightroom serves many purposes but it is essentially a database program, and a database is an ‘organized system of information’.  If you have an address book with people’s names, addresses and phone numbers in it on your desk or in your pocket, that’s a database.  So is a phone book, a postal code directory or a library coding system for books. 

The term ‘folder’ goes back to the days of filing cabinets where we had physical cabinets and each cabinet had drawers and each drawer had file folders, and each file folder held various pieces of paper.  You would think of the folder as being within the drawer and the drawer as being within the cabinet, so if you were to write those out with some sort of hierarchy it might look like this: Continue Reading →

More on Lightroom and Metadata

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Hi Folks:

Someone on Twitter recently asked about understanding Lightroom’s various metadata fields.  I responded by providing a link to our Lightroom, File Management and Metadata post.  She wrote back and basically said, ‘Thanks for the information, but what I really want to know is what all of those fields are for…”  So I wrote the following.  She seemed to appreciate it, and I thought it might be of use to you as well. Continue Reading →

Lightroom, File Management and Metadata

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Hi Folks:

This has been covered before on other sites (and to some extent on ours), but since I recently explained all of this to someone on Twitter I thought I’d take what I wrote then and massage it into some form of post for our blog.

To begin with we need to cover a few terms. One is that, as I mentioned in our Should I Get Lightroom or Photoshop or…? post, a digital image isn’t really an ‘image’ in the traditional sense. It starts as light, gets converted into electrical impulses by the camera’s sensor, and is then translated into binary code – 1s and 0s – as a digital file. Be that as it may, there are two aspects to each digital image. One is the image information itself – the code that is assembled to create the image on your computer screen or as a print, and the other is information about the image. This starts in the camera and can include the camera make/model/serial number, the exposure information, date and time of the image capture, the lens, focal length (for zoom lenses), GPS information and more. When the image is transferred to the computer one can add copyright information, keywords, owner contact information… All of this is collectively called ‘metadata’. This metadata is stored in one of two ways, depending on the type of digital image you’re working with. For .TIF, .PSD, .JPG and .DNG files, the metadata is stored within the image file itself. For raw images, a second file, often called a ‘sidecar’ file is generated. Sidecar files have an .XMP extension. Therefore, for a Canon raw file for example, one would have IMG0001.cr2 for the image data, and IMG0001.xmp for the metadata information.

Continue Reading →