“Workflow has become such a ubiquitous term, that some might find it off-putting,” says commercial photographer, workflow expert and digital asset management (DAM) educator Kevin Ames. “Whatever you call it, photographers benefit from practicing a consistent set of procedures to manage their photographs – especially in the digital world.”.
The old adage, ‘if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there’ can and will get you to interesting places. Such an approach when working with original digital negatives is risky, says Ames. The greatest danger is lost files whether because they’re misplaced on hard drives or DVDs or because the hard drive itself fails before the images are safely stored on non-volatile media like optical discs.
Ames recommends two key steps that will keep you safe from those ‘interesting’ destinations of lost, or ever worse irretrievable data. First, create a digital archive, using both hard drives and permanent copies on DVDs. Second, develop a process by which you can quickly find and access the images in that archive at any time; no matter if the image is a RAW digital negative or a layered Photoshop document (PSD) several megabytes in size.
“People truly remember only emotionally significant things. Everything else can and will quickly pass from memory,” says Kevin. “That’s why it’s critical to get digital negatives named properly with metadata added to support detailed searches on permanent media (such as CDs, DVDs) as soon as possible. That’s also why cataloging is so important.”
The hardest part of developing an effective workflow, Ames says, is simply getting started. His message to students is encouraging: “Developing your workflow is never going to be more difficult than it is right this moment. It is only going to get easier. Having a scalable set of steps in place to take advantage of software advances and new media mean workflow will get faster and simpler over time.”
In his workshops he encourages photographers to develop a method that works for them that includes these twelve steps of a best practices camera-to-archive-to-showing photography to a client workflow.
