[jfdavis58]

The IPTC header has been a part of every CS version of Photoshop; it's included and touted by several third party image management solutions as 'included' or 'supported'.

But the actual IPTC specification is now 2 years stagnant and it never really applied to the semi-pro or the hobbyist in any meaningful fashion.

Most of the information entered into IPTC Header fields is straightforward: name, title, date taken. But several important fields require something called a 'Controlled Vocabulary'; and the one referenced at IPTC home site is clearly commercial reportage centric. Not suitable for the user cataloging family snapshots.

And this is a serious drawback to the powerful library searching functions of these softwares.

Have you developed a Controlled Vocabulary for your DAM? Did you find one somewhere on the web? If yes to either, would you share the DAM thing with the rest of us?

I'm not the only one looking: Soccor Mom.


Some further explanation:
"Keywording" refers to adding terms from a controlled vocabulary to a database of photographs to aid later retrieval. The most important component of keywording is the notion of a controlled vocabulary, a specific set of words from which index terms can be taken. Keywording is the a traditional means of indexing photographs, and is taught as Indexing in library school. A photograph of children on a swing, for example, might be given the keywords CHILD; PLAYING; and SUMMER.


The primary benefit to using keywords is that the controlled vocabulary makes the indexing more precise. Further, it is easier to search on a keyworded database because you can choose from a finite list of keywords to frame your search. On the other hand, it takes longer to add terms using this system, because the indexer has to look at a long list of keywords and thesaurus entries for each picture. The indexing itself is likely to be less descriptive because only use certain words can be used to describe photograph. And it takes longer to search, because seachers need to look at thesaurus and keyword list. This picture of a small child feeding sheep is an easy image to keyword: ANIMAL, CHILD, FARM.

It is easier and quicker to index photographs using the free text method. The indexer simply free associates with all themes or items in photograph. As a result, the indexing is likely to be more descriptive because terms are unique to each photograph. However, because of the lack of vocabulary control, indexers could use synonyms to describe similar images (homicide & murder; jogging & running; parachuting & skydiving; protest & demonstration). If an indexer uses "running" to describe a photo of someone training for a marathon , but the searcher thinks of it as "jogging" and enters that term, the specific photograph may not be retrieved. This image of a principal moving into new office would be a good candidate for free text indexing, and a bad candidate for keywording. Keywords: SCHOOL? WORKING? TEACHER? When really: sunlight; office; moving; summer; start of new school term; starting a new job; unpacking; mess; bookshelves.

All snatched from:this source.

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Last edited by jfdavis58; 04-10-2007 at 05:48 PM.

[jfdavis58]

Well, somebody is reading this; perhaps a few are thinking-it-over. After Amy's paper I worked-out a little scenario:

I don't want to do any more photo cataloging!

Images come from the camera in folders tagged with the date-each image is labeled with a number. They should stay that way on my hard-drive.

A card's worth of images may have 100-plus images from several events or places. The first few may not have the same people as subjects as those in the middle or at the end: no matter. I want to ingest them as dated files of numbered images, period.

During the culling process I remove the deadwood and the screw-ups, permanantly. Let's say I have some from a breakfast meeting, some from a luncheon with an award presentation, a few landscapes and architecture shots and finish the card with a handful of grabs from a kids birthday party.

I begin with keywording these files: Breakfast, old coots, Rosie's grill, guests. Luncheon, womens guild, sewing, achievement, life time, guests. Landscapes, Buildings, Mycity, SW quad, street intersection, season, building names. Joe, birthday, seven, chuckecheese, party, guests.

Notice that the last keyward is a generic term for people or item names--this would be replaced with actual names. Maybe Joe is named for his grandfather. Sometime later I need a picture of the old man, Joe. I may have several scattered in my library of "dated files of numbered images".

I search by keywords, starting with Joe--which brings up both the images of those old coots having breakfast and the kids at the party. By adding breakfast to my keyword search I get all the photos from all the breakfasts I shared with the ol' gang. To get Joe's wife, Mary and her lifetime sewing achievement award I use Mary, sewing, guild, achievement.

What's important is that I don't need to spend time at the beginning, sorting these photos into particular folders or onto particular hard-drives or CD/DVDs or into any special grouping; and I can let the computer rapidly search through all my library for anything that matches a few keyword 'element's' of what I want to see.

I can, of course just use the date as a search criteria or rename all those files and find everyone that has Joe in the title-yikes! I've got upward of one-hundred twenty-five thousand personal photos already sorted by a primative name/date/subject system---I don't have time to do more than add them to my existing collection and clone lists of keyword into each file. Maybe I'll make a few additional keyword assignments as I'm ingesting these, maybe not. I don't want to re-work everything I've already done.

So I'm looking for suggestions from anyone who has performed the task. And if they don't exist yet on this forum, then I'm looking to start a group that might be interested in working-out some guidelines for creating a personal/amateur/average guy type of Keyword List.

[WMBP]

John,

Are you talking about something other than keywords? I assign keywords in Adobe Lightroom. It's one of the first things I do after import, indeed, sometimes I do it as part of the import process (if I know that all the photos should get the keyword "volleyball" for example). As the keyword field is an IPTC field, these keywords are then visible/searchable when I export from Raw files managed in Lightroom to JPEGs managed in Picasa. The keywords can be viewed in most other photo management or editing programs, and they even survive being uploaded to any one of several photo sharing services on the Web.

As for a controlled vocabulary, I don't use anything especially formal. I certainly haven't approached the universe of potential subjects in an analytical fashion, the way M. Roget did when he made his famous thesaurus. If I want to assign the keyword "whooping crane" to a photo, Lightroom shows me a selection list that verifies this keyword is already in use. Lightroom also adds "implied" keywords, that is, I assign "whooping crane" and "birds" gets assigned by inference, because I've defined whooping crane as a child in the group "birds." Obviously, you don't assign a keyword to a photo if you expect the photo to be a unique instance of that keyword: the whole point of keywords is to allow you to group sets of images. If I take a picture of one of my daughter's friends, I'll put the other child's name in the IPTC description field (which is searchable) but not use it as a keyword.

This system works very well - and one of Lightroom's greatest strengths is adding keywords and other metadata, so I can analyze 300 photos and add the necessary metadata for them in as little as a few minutes, at least if a lot of the photos use the same keywords.

And that's about as organized as I need to be. Anyway, are you after something different?

Will

[jfdavis58]

No, that's it Will; right on the money.

In photoshop/lightroom you can import a template from IPTC that will guide your filling the form with the standard information: Name, title, date, copyright. But the Keywords are commercial-IPTC is professions use.

The article I cited was old, a foundation document I stumbled upon through Google searches this afternoon. The keyword list in the article is 65 pages with 25 or so keywords per page (1600 keywords). That a bit much for a personal list---I think.

I expect to do some individual tailoring of keywords; my family names are different from yours for instance. That author defines two specific types of keywording: controlled vocabulary and free-texting. These are old terms and PS/LR allows a sort of hybrid system which could be the best of both.

So, if I can find a list or if we can cobble a list together from several persons partial lists, then we save some effort. I'm looking for others who are a bit ahead in building a list, a few at about my stage and maybe some behind.

And there are other advantages, too. Some keywords are obvious, but others are not. In the cited article the author lists alphabetically and includes some specific exclusions or more effective alternatives. This is the kind of thing where shared insights are very helpful.

The author also included some supplemental lists; specific terms that can be combined with more than one word to make a more effective keyword pair or multiple pairings. And even a few special lists with terms specific to the layout of subject in the photo. And other keyword alternatives. One coming to mind is teenager vs juvenile-the first for an ordinary kid the second for kid delinquency.

But again, the thrust of the cited paper is newspaper reporting/commercial photo library. Most of us have families (names), with specific individual activities(basketball), and standard stuff like vacations, church, work, etc. Here both specific lists and guidelines from experience would be a big help.

Say, 500 or so keywords listed and annotated like my reference article-freely exchanged on this forum. Each user makes their own specific adjustments. And then by sharing experiences we get to pick and choose the best additional refinements.

[WMBP]

No, that's it Will; right on the money.

In photoshop/lightroom you can import a template from IPTC that will guide your filling the form with the standard information: Name, title, date, copyright. But the Keywords are commercial-IPTC is professions use.

I am vaguely aware that Lightroom can do a LOT of things that I have not yet asked it to do. I just use the IPTC fields that seem to be part of the default setup.

So, if I can find a list or if we can cobble a list together from several persons partial lists, then we save some effort. I'm looking for others who are a bit ahead in building a list, a few at about my stage and maybe some behind.

Well, I'd be curious to see what you or anybody else has done; might learn something from it. But my keyword "set" is very personal. It includes keywords for many of the lenses I use (since Lightroom apparently can't always figure this out for itself). It includes the national and state parks we've visited, which are not the parks others may have visited. And my list changes fairly often as I take new photos. For example, I've got lots of birds in there, but I didn't get them by copying bird names out of Sibley, then waiting for the birds to appear in front of my lens. ;-) I add 'em as I need 'em. For example, "bald eagle" has been in my list for years, but "whooping crane" just got added last month.

The article you cited seems to me to have some good general points about the problem of keywording. For me though there are three things that matter most.

First, I want to be able to see the keywords that I have actually used - not a list of possibilities. Seeing the words I've actually used allows me to edit that list and change my mind about keywords. Simple example: When I started using Lightroom, I discovered that I had used both "bird" and "birds" as keywords. I hadn't noticed this in Picasa, which I used previously, because Picasa doesn't let you SEE the keywords you've used, it just lets you assign keywords sort of in the dark. In Lightroom, I was able to find all the photos tagged with "bird" and change them to "birds," which was the one I decided to keep. I regard this kind of fiddling as inevitable and healthy.

Second, I'm addicted now to Lightroom's implied keywords feature. Perhaps CS2/CS3 have this, too, I don't know. My daughter "Catherine" is also automatically assigned the keywords "family" and "children". All the individual bird species automatically get the keyword "birds" as well.

Third, keywording is supposed to be a timesaver, so I want to be able to do it quickly and efficiently. It's an old librarian's paradox that you can spend so much time cataloguing books that you have no time left actually to read. Moral here is not simply the negative one - don't overdo it! - but also that it's better to be a little vague than to be overprecise. I've been tagging birds by species fairly precisely. I'm beginning to think I should tag them by general class - say, using the chapter headings in the Sibley or Stokes guides. I can't tell a Cooper's hawk from a sharp-shinned hawk, but I can tell it's a hawk, so it's probably best to keyword it as "hawk" (if not something even more general like "raptor"), since it's better to find more than I want and winnow, than to find less than I want and have to keep searching. That's what I'm starting to do with birds now - keep the keywords somewhat general, and put the species name into the title or description field when I have it.

One thing's for certain: If you take lots of photos, you want to have good digital asset management software of some type and use it intelligently. I'm fond of Lightroom for this purpose, but there are many alternatives. All I can say is that Lightroom came along at just the right moment for me, as I've taken more photos in the last six months than I took in the previous several years. ;-)

Will

[Jonas B]

I don't have anything sensible that I can share as I am in a thinking process of changing the tags in my DAM.

My DAM is called iMatch (a windows thing only) from photools.com. It has it's good and bad points and can be checked out at the vendors site.

One thing with iMatch is that the keywords are not written to the IPTC fields but to the application's database. The keywords are called "categories" and when opening the Category window they are all shown in the hierarchical structure. This hierarchical structure is pretty much build the same way as the directories on the hard drive are build.

For example: I have a top categorie called Family. Then under Family there are the names of everybody belonging to my western nuclear family: It's me, Adam, my wife Bodil, our children Christina, Daniel and Eva. Another "top" category is Geography and under it there are categories like Europa and Asia. Under Europa we have Sweden and France and Germany. Under Sweden we have Göteborg and Stockholm and under Göteborg we have Downtown and Great suburb. All this is just to illustrate how it works...

Now I can go find a picture by ask for all pictures of anyone in the family anywhere in the world by adding the categories to the bolean expression (by dragging the category to a graphical expressionbuilder). In this example I just drag Family to the AND box and I get all pictures that are related to our nuclear family. Then I decide to exclude my wife so I drag the category Bodil to the NOT box. The result is all pictures of me and/or any kid. Now I also drag Göteborg to the AND box so all pictures takenanywhere else are gone.

Another example: I can find any picture related to or of Christina by dragging Christina to the AND box. If I then drag the category People to the NOT box I get pictures related to Christina but only those that don't show her.

Another example: I canclear the search box and drag Christina to the AND box and then also drag the category Group shots to the AND box to get all the group pictures I have where Christina is in them.

You get the idea...

For the moment I have too many top categories. I am thinking about decrease the number of them by going back to the four common Who, Where, When and What. Then I need a few more like Projects and some others but maximum total will be seven or eight.

IMatch is very flexible and there are scripting possibilities and a lot of things I don't know if I need or what they are called. I use the basic functions and learn one thing at a time. This is a slow process as I'm not very interested. After three years I'm still satisfied with having my pictures ordered on the hard drive (and the back-ups), categories assigned every second week after the culling process and a basically working system.

Now my categories are a bit wild and spread out. Making improvements here arent that hard: The categoris can be resorted (like directories on the HDD, again) by dragging them around, and renamed, and...

For the moment I have to think a bit more about my top categories. Then I'll start dragging them around and see what it looks like.

I'll follow this thread and if there is anything I can contribute with I'll do so.

(I do some batch writing to the IPTC fields in ACR, btw. Then I run a script to import the fields into iMatch database to make them visible and searchable.)

Comments?

[Jonas B]

Is there anyone that has something further for this thread? I'm a bit curious to see how you are thinking about your keywords/tags/categories...

[khardur]

Is there anyone that has something further for this thread? I'm a bit curious to see how you are thinking about your keywords/tags/categories...

Well, this doesn't involve keywords so much, but I organize/view my photos in Photoshop Elements 5.0's organizer. As I'm importing them I tag them with ratings from 1-5 stars. a 1* is a screw up, or something I simply don't want - later on I sort out all the 1* photos. A 2* photo is something I want to hold onto, but not something I want anyone to see. Maybe something I'm emotionally attached to for some reason, or for educational purposes... (I tried this, it didn't work, don't do this again)

But I usually purge those after a backup. Anything 3* and above I process - sometimes it's multiple versions of the same photo (with different aperture/shutter combinations and such) - then I compare the two and often then downgrade one to a 2* and the other higher, if it's a keeper.

Later on I add keywords, though i should do it much earlier.. But I've been shooting mostly the same area lately because of the spotty weather only allowing me so much time, as soon as I start travelling again I'll be keywording a lot more, especially with new places/subjects.

[Jonas B]

Thank you Dan.
As you say you are mainly posting about your workflow. I'm a bit surprised that this important field doesn't draw more interest. After a few thousand pictures most people suddenly understands that they must get organized. Maybe we aren't there yet here in our little forum?

[jfdavis58]

Sorry Jonas, got a little busy with some tedious and time consuming paperwork. Not much time the last couple days to do much more than check in and make a few easy comments. I'm still working on the IPTC and other keywording things and I'll be back in a couple of days with some of my results.

[Jonas B]

Sorry Jonas, got a little busy with some tedious and time consuming paperwork. Not much time the last couple days to do much more than check in and make a few easy comments. I'm still working on the IPTC and other keywording things and I'll be back in a couple of days with some of my results.

And your comments are grandious ones.

No hurry. I was just surprised about the low interest shown in this very important topic.

[jfdavis58]

It takes a while to accumulate a large collection. And I've had the time to build a grandious one!

A few hundred is pretty easy to sort, a thousand or so takes an afternoon.

I tend to do long personal projects with many photos: 25 years of highschool basketball-28000-32000 shots; a church project now in it's fourth year, 300-400 shots at each of 152 churches; the cats at the zoo over 15 years, 6-8 visits a year, 60 to 200 photos per visit. Six to 8 visits to nearby national parks-take Calsbad Caverns, shot 1400 during the last visit--been there six time in the last 15 years.

And I can only guestimate the number shot at the AIBF-I've been every year. That started in 1972. A couple years ago I scanned all the slides I shot during the '94 or '95 fiesta; a roll or two over two hundred 36 exposure rolls. I went three times last year. Filled ....

Well, you get the idea. I need an assistant.