[Wheatfield]

Because I charge $150 per question. That reminds me Rupert still owes me that money.

Be careful what you ask for my friend. He is a plumber, he might just send you $150.00 worth of whatever he fixed yesterday...

[barondla]

Snydly, I had no idea what ITPC was either. I am a computer beginner. At least my organizing can be transferred to other programs. Takes a big worry out of the equation. Do shoot all raw. Elements 8 works fine with K10/20D, and K-7. Not sure the colors look the same as when converted in Silky/Pentax software.

Don't find The editing part of Elements 8 a lot different than my old Elements 2 ( for the features they have in common). The organizing in 8 is complicated (never tried it in 2). Worried that the Adobe book seems to have 150+ pages on organization. It shouldn't take that much to organize images imho. Afraid that any thing so complicated will become unmanageable to me after awhile if not used every day. Organizing shouldn't be as complicated as taking the images!

Computers should make image organization easier. So far it is much easier to organize my slides. Have made it to pg 53 in the Adobe classroom book.
thanks
barondla

Check out POINT & SHOOT CONTEST #26 in compact camera forum. Enter #27. Any brand camera. Enter now!

Hey Wheatfield what PS disaster?

[Snydly]

You guys are the best. Lately, if I feel invisible (cars pull out in front of me; kids don't listen to me; my lovely wife stares through me; etc) I run to the computer and log on here. I can't believe you guys read and respond so quickly. The knowledge base and courtesy here is superb... Now if we could just get you all elected to congress...

Marc, is the DAM book a simple 'Large Book Retailer' find, or should I go online?

Thanks again...

Bill

[WMBP]

A question for WMBP about organization and programs. You have organized your photos in Lightroom (with key words etc.). Now you are thinking of using ACDSEE Pro. Wouldn't you have to start your organization all over again with retagging etc? Or will One program work with what you have already tagged in a different program?

I think Marc S. has already answered this, more or less, by pointing out that IPTC data is stored inside the files and can be read by all or most programs. For the purpose of organizing photos, this means most of all that I must rely on IPTC keywords. Fortunately, keywords are perhaps the most effective way to manage your photo library. Keywords assigned in Lightroom are recognized by ACDSee Pro 3, or at least can be read from the IPTC data.

Nevertheless, your question does touch on a very real problem. Whenever metadata is stored in a program's database and NOT stored in some universally accessible part of the image file itself, then you do get rather tied to the program. I don't like this idea.

Now there are two ways for a program (like Lightroom, or ACDSee Pro or Google Picasa or whatever) to use a database.

First, the program can use the database primarily as a way of indexing info that is basically stored in the photos. That is certainly the way that Picasa works, and it's one of the things that I most like about Picasa. You can for example move folders around in Picasa, or rename folders, and it doesn't confuse Picasa at all. Picasa indexes metadata so it can help you find photos extremely quickly; but the indexes are based on info stored in the photos, and if you move photos around, Picasa fairly quickly picks up on this fact and amends its indexes (i.e. its own database) without requiring you to do anything at all.

Second, the program can use the database to store info that is NOT stored in the image files. It's not clear to me to what degree this is done, say, by Lightroom or ACDSee Pro 3, although I'm pretty sure that Lightroom is much more dependent on its own database than ACDSee Pro 3 is - and that's one of the reasons that I'm interested in ACDSee Pro.

However, I should add that it seems to me that ACDSee Pro has its own keyword system, apart from the IPTC keywords. I just looked at some photos that I took on vacation last July in the Rocky Mountains and processed at the time in Lightroom 2.5. I assigned the keywords "RMNP" (Rocky Mountain National Park) and "vacation" to those photos. When I opened the image files (that is, the DNG originals) in ACDSee Pro just now, and looked at ACDSee Pro's keywords field, these keywords were NOT there. However, ACDSee Pro has a separate tab that lets you look at IPTC data - and the Lightroom keywords were there. I haven't explored this yet, so I'm not sure, but at the moment it looks as if ACDSee Pro has its own keyword system, which is separate from the IPTC system. Lightroom, as far as I can tell right now, does not, that is, its keywords are written do (and indexed from) the IPTC data.

So it's all rather confusing. Still, the thing that matters MOST to me, is processing photos as well as possible, which means (a) generating the best possible output (b) in the most efficient manner possible. BOTH of those goals are critical. I could no doubt do a brilliant job on any individual photo in Photoshop, if only I were good enough at Photoshop. But Photoshop is simply not designed for efficient processing of lots of images. If I can be permitted to make up numbers to make a point, I feel that using Lightroom or ACDSee Pro, I feel like I'm perhaps making a 1-2% compromise in the quality of my output, in return for a 10-20% improvement in efficiency. It's a good compromise, in my view.

*

There's a further problem here that you have to come to grips with when you reach the point, as I did a while ago, of having tens of thousands of images in your library, and that is, how much time do you want to devote to keywording or other file-management activities? Do I really want to give every photo of a bride the keyword "bride"? If there's a groom in the photo, do I also want to assign the keyword "groom"? Do I need to assign the keyword "Catherine" to every photo in which my daughter Catherine appears, even if she is not the focal point of the photo? My own approach is not quite minimalist. I worry about giving keywords mainly to my best photos, ignoring the others, except when a mediocre photo simply has some special interest because of its content. I just don't have that much time to spend organizing my photos.

Will

[Marc Sabatella]

First - I got my copy of "The DAM Book" at my local Barnes & Noble. Might not be in every store in the world, but it's from a major publisher in this world (O'Reilly) so it shouldn't be hard to find at all.

the program can use the database to store info that is NOT stored in the image files. It's not clear to me to what degree this is done, say, by Lightroom or ACDSee Pro 3, although I'm pretty sure that Lightroom is much more dependent on its own database than ACDSee Pro 3 is - and that's one of the reasons that I'm interested in ACDSee Pro.

However, I should add that it seems to me that ACDSee Pro has its own keyword system, apart from the IPTC keywords.

Correct. The way ACDSee is structured, it is much easier to enter info into ACDSee's database than to get it directly into IPTC. So I do my initial entry to the database, then I run a command (Batch Set Information) just before archiving a day's images to copy those db fields to IPTC. The same command can be used to copy info from IPTC to the db. You need to create your own presets to define which fields get copied where, but once you've done that, it's just a couple clicks to do the copy from then on.

There's a further problem here that you have to come to grips with when you reach the point, as I did a while ago, of having tens of thousands of images in your library, and that is, how much time do you want to devote to keywording or other file-management activities? Do I really want to give every photo of a bride the keyword "bride"?

Yeah, those are tough issues. I generally give at least two keywords to each image - a general one like "portraits" or "landscapes", and something a bit more specific like the name of the person or place featured. The fact that ACDSee lets you easily multi-select discontiguous groups of photos (everything with the bride in them, for examples) makes it easier than doing this one image at a time, which is what ACDSee makes you do with IPTC. But it's definitely about finding balance.

[WMBP]

The way ACDSee is structured, it is much easier to enter info into ACDSee's database than to get it directly into IPTC. So I do my initial entry to the database, then I run a command (Batch Set Information) just before archiving a day's images to copy those db fields to IPTC. The same command can be used to copy info from IPTC to the db. You need to create your own presets to define which fields get copied where, but once you've done that, it's just a couple clicks to do the copy from then on.

Thanks for this tip, Marc. I hadn't yet discovered this batch set info command - looks very very useful.

Will