Cataloging Photos
One of the advantages of digital photography is that it's easy and inexpensive to take many images. The downside of that is the eventual need to catalog many images. Cataloging photos allows them to be found quickly and easily.The first thing to decide when cataloging is what overall organization the collection of image files will have. While cataloging software allows images to be placed in multiple catalogs, deciding on the organization of the files allows new files to be quickly placed in the correct location. A common method of organizing files is by date, but files can also be organized by subject, location taken, or other criteria.
A quick cataloging solution is to have the file organization be the only method of cataloging the images. The disadvantage is that it is much harder to find a given file or to rapidly view a set of images that doesn't conform to the file organization. For example, it would be time consuming to look for all flower photos if the photos were organized by date.
Cataloging Software
A better solution is to use a free or low cost cataloging program. Aside from making it easier to view thumbnails of the images, most inexpensive cataloging software also allows for keywords and comments to be assigned to a photo and runs slideshows of larger versions of a set of photos. The description fields provides a place to make notes about a photo that are too long for the keyword field.More advanced cataloging programs will have even more options. The options below are given for Portfolio, but will apply to many cataloging programs. Advanced programs allow the photographer to not only assign keywords and comments, but automatically track things such as file size, image dimensions, and date modified. Searches can be performed on all of those in addition to searching on custom data, which is data entered into fields set up by the photographer. Advanced programs will also let the photographer customize the layout of the thumbnails and data and to switch between layouts.
Useful Data
The ease with which a file can be found depends on how much useful data is entered into the cataloging software. Aside from the things tracked by the software, such as the height of the image and the date it was created, some kinds of keywords are obviously useful. Common keywords would be the name of the subject of a portrait or the location of a landscape shot. Other useful keywords depend on the content of the photos and the needs of the photographer. The photo at the right might have keywords like "cosmo" (the kind of flower), "flower", "horizontal" (orientation), "marco" (type of lens), "white", and "Wisconsin" (where the photo was shot).For data that should be logged for every photo, custom data fields should be used. Custom data fields allow the photographer to keep a shorter list of keywords and to enter data more quickly and with fewer errors, since custom data fields can be made of droplists as well as text fields. Information that might be tracked in custom fields varies by photographer, but common examples might be the location the photo was taken, the event at which the photo was taken, the CD to which the photo is archived, the subject of a photo from a list of common subjects (portraits, flowers, landscapes, etc.), and the orientation of the photo (horizontal, vertical, or square).
