So, really, we’re not a lush, or, at least, not a complete lush. We do enjoy pinot noir, among other vintages, but we also spend many hours a day working on hard problems like finding exactly the right data and physical schema for my photo archive.
Today we took advice from Peter Krogh’s book (The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers) and friend Scott about the lowest-cost method (in labor and other resources) to catalog my (at this point) 41 years in photography.
We have, roughly, some 100,000 digital images created in the past 10 years or so. Worse, our garage contains about 200 boxes stuffed with prints, clippings, negatives and transparencies, which may constitute a similar or much larger number. Almost none of these images, of course, are cataloged, digitally or otherwise.
Krogh’s book makes the point that the greater part of a photo’s value is the ability to find it. A mediocre image that is well tagged with so-called meta-data is more discoverable, and thus, potentially, salable than a fantastic image languishing, unheralded, in one of the boxes in my garage. Krogh proposes a work flow that automatically attaches info, with relatively few keystrokes, that make photos far more searcher-friendly. We’ve already started doing this for InMenlo assignments.
As for the garage stash, we decided ‘in-situ cataloging’ was a good match for the Krogh/Loftesness hybrid work flow. Basically, we’ve printed out a bunch of 3×4-inch sticky labels with box numbers – Box 1, Box 2 etc. – and are slapping them on the Kodak 11×14 and 8×10 Kodabromide boxes that hold the vast majority of my archive. We then scan as much of the box’s contents as seems wise – from a few prints to the whole contents.
The result is an archive of high-res images (both prints and negs go to high-quality, high-res scanners) of the best images with pointers in the keywords field to the location of the print or neg. Other photos of similar vintage, frequently the outtakes, are in the same boxes, so there is at least a vector to these previously utterly unavailable images, and I’m not stuck scanning thousands of images to get the few I care about.
In the process, I’m editing, and thus adding value (if you believe Krogh) to the archive. The artist’s hand is visible, as it were.
Next up, we’re thinking about integrating 2D barcodes on the boxes, the prints (with removable, archival labels) and on the web. In theory, a prospective buyer could point their iPhone cam at one of the photo archive’s barcoded web-page images, and buy it with a click. We at the archive could find and ship it quickly. Ka-ching!
Nice having an electronic payments genius for a close friend. But, getting back to my other favorite topic, drinking wine, did we mention the unwisdom of posting after a few cups of the grape…?
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