Digital Asset Management - software of choice?

[fourcolourblack]

I was spoiled by working at a National newspaper where all you had to do was draga and drop images into a folder and you could batch tag everything about them. Photographer, date, project, keywords etc etc.

There were millions of shots in there and was particularly handy if you just needed say, a kettle quickly and could find every picture of a kettle from the last 12 years.

Now at the agency I'm at there is no system. Apart from the filing system from photoshoots, we don't really have a way to search for a kettle for example.

Can anyone reccomend any software for storing images? I know it goes browser based a lot of the time now, thats cool so long as it works. Always prefer actual software though.

thanks,
adam

 

[Blue Velvet]

Depends on the size and scale of what it is you're trying to do. In the last studio I was in, I set up a server on an old G4 tower over gigabit ethernet for shared assets and everyone used Adobe Bridge which seemed to work quite well, along with some sensible categorisation of files. Didn't do a lot of tagging, though, as it was too time-consuming. I still use Bridge now when working from home but Filemaker Pro also seems to get used in some studios.

 

[fourcolourblack]

I've managed to convert everyone to actualy using Bridge since I started working here. Before that, I think everyone was actually just actually looking at the finder previews or "preview" itself.

I love Bridge, even if there was a was you could search within Bridge for tagged photos. See the problem is currently the 4,000+ downloads from istock. Its just too many to handle for one folder and you can't start breaking such random images down into folders.

I'd watched a demo of Extensis Portfolio but I'm not keen on any Extensis software really.

Looking for some particularly where you're just viewing a comp for speed.

 

[sarge]

I've never worked with Cumulus before, but they just released an update that is used by major archives. I can find out who AP uses if you really want to know...
I myself just bit the bullet and bought Lightroom to catalog my stuff - I have to say I'm really, really happy I did.


EDIT:BTW, I like the fact that I can copy images to a backup drive and have the metadata travel as a sidecar file to the raw image.

 

[fourcolourblack]

You know, I'd never even considered Lightroom. Might just look at that. I'd be interested to know what major archivers use though, PA too.

 

[fidgetyfish]

You know, I'd never even considered Lightroom. Might just look at that. I'd be interested to know what major archivers use though, PA too.

Did you ever find out what the major corps use, I'm looking for an alternative to Portfolio. I don't need to store anything otherthan photos for our photo library. I need to organise and add on our macs but distribute over the network to the pc's in a none editing way. Any suggestions welcome, even if it's that I stick with Portfolio 8.