A Site For The Future
This is an excerpt from my Digital Workflow course material;
The goal of an effective digital photography workflow is to be able to organize, secure, display, and deliver work to a client (or prospective clients). Ideally, it should be an extension of your mind and the way you work – facilitating a smooth and efficient flow of ideas from capture to output. Particularly in this multiple publishing platform, multimedia digital age, an essential component of managing image libraries today is associating them with the right keywords and captions so that they can be found both on- and off-line.
The beauty of doing this with a program such as Adobe Lightroom 2 is that an entire batch of images can be associated with keywords and other appropriate information while the images are being imported from the memory card into a hard drive in one step. I also set it up so that the images, along with all the keywords and other metadata, is imported into one external drive, and backed up into a separate second external drive at the same time, while Lightroom simultaneously builds up a database containing the keywords associated with each image as well as the location where each image is stored. This insures, that even after several busy months of shooting, I can easily find images that were done several months (or even years) before by doing a keyword search.
Once all the images have been associated with the right keywords, titles, and captions off-line, these images (and all associated metadata) can be uploaded to my Photoshelter Archive, which can read and retain all the data associated with the images. Among other things. Photoshelter’s service also includes many features that would appeal to professionals, such as built-in e-commerce tools, rights-managed licensing models based on fotoquote (a standardized software for calculating usage rates in North America), the ability to store and deliver high-resolution output files (as well as RAW files), automatically putting a watermark on displayed images (while being able to deliver un-watermarked high-resolution originals to clients), and being able to embed images and flash galleries into a blog or web page link point directly to the originals. This makes for very efficient digital asset management since all the keywords and captions only have to be done once and the images that are displayed on-line flow from one source.
Think of an Archive like a reservoir, which you can stream out into various media. Once in my Archive, if I wanted an image on my blog, such as the illustration you see above, I don’t have to create or upload a duplicate copy of it, since what you see is an embedded image that references directly to the original in my archive. As an exercise, try;
- Clicking on the illustration above, in which case it will take you to the original image in my Archive.
- Go to the Search Images box at the bottom of this page and type ‘Workflow’, which is on of the keywords I associated with the above illustration.
- Click on the white triangle at the bottom right of the above illustration, copy the embed code, and embed the same illustration into your blog. This is exactly the same way the image was embedded into this post (or the same method used in embedding Youtube videos into blogs and webpages).
Images can be presented or delivered to the clients in the same way, or ’streamed out’ into my Blog/Website, Facebook account, or any of the other on-line publishing and networking tool.