Attention iView users - Please advise

[digidurst]

Hi all! I've been really bad with regard to digital asset management and I have a backlog of

photos that I need to organize. Because the task seems so daunting, I've been putting it off

but it's time to do something!

 

I would appreciate any advice from fellow iView users about the best way to go about the

task. Any tips on how to break it down so I'm not so overwhelmed? What about catalogs?

Can you share what has worked for you? Like do you have seperate catalogs for say

'family', 'nature', etc. or what? Or perhaps you utilize catalog sets? What about pitfalls I

should avoid?

 

Thanks in advance for the help!

[andrew_certain]

I imported all my photos into iView about a year ago and have been using it ever since to

manage my photos. At first it is a little daunting to catalog all the old images, but I found

I got into a groove and it didn't take me as long as I thought it would.

 

One thing you can try is to work in batches from the same shoot. If you go into slideshow

mode (I have it set up to start a slideshow when you double-click on an image), you can

use the number keys to sort the pictures. I would go through the images and assign #1,

say, to the set of people in the first image. If the same people were in the second, I'd

assign it to #1 as well. If they were a different set, I would assign it to #2. After I got

through all the pictures, I'd sort by label, select all the images with the same people and

enter the people's names. If there were more combinations of people than available

labels, I repeated the process with the left-over pictures.

 

Assuming your EXIF information is correct, the first thing I always do is run the "Make

Event Date from Capture Date" script in the scripts menu. I also set it up so that when I'm

looking at the pictures in a catalog, it shows the filename, the event date and the people.

 

After I have all the people information entered, I reset the labels and go through each

image again, tagging my favorites. I then select them all and enter a keyword indicating

that they are best. Finally, I enter "Checked" in the Status field so that I can search for

images without that Status to find ones I still need to annotate.

 

To organize the files, I put new downloaded files in a directory named for the download

date. The directory structure doesn't really matter all that much since you can pull images

up by any field in iView. It only matters if you have filenames that might conflict (e.g. you

have two cameras or you've rolled over the counter).

 

There are also forums at the iView website where you can ask questions.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Andrew