Archiving – a necessary evil. No matter how you have it setup, no matter how you schedule time to maintain it, I’ve never heard of a single photog who actually enjoys doing archive work. We rather dread it. And what we dread most of all is a situation where all that time and work is destroyed when something goes wrong, leaving us to start from scratch.
Yep – had that nightmare.
A short re-cap: since I began my archive, I’ve used idImager freeware to apply keywords, maintain a database, and search out files. The software was functional and best of all, free. I’d generally build up a month’s worth of photos, then spend a Sunday transferring them to an external hard drive, keywording them, and backing them up to DVDs.
The beginning of the end came when I got a new desktop computer, which applied a new drive letter to my external HD. I didn’t notice the problem at first and continued to transfer and keyword as usual. Until I tried to use idImager to search for photos one day, and discovered that everything that was recorded as being under the old drive letter was no longer accessible, and had to be redirected to manually.
I should have stopped right there and changed the drive letter, re-mapped all the new files, and been done with it. But instead I kept re-mapping old files as I happened to search for them, and soon my archive was completely fragmented, with random folders out of each year re-mapped or still “missing” to the software.
Simply put, what I did was dumb from the start. (Although it is annoying that idImager would map files to the drive location as part of the keywording process, with no way to alter that via a batch process.)
As a result, I got to rebuild my entire image archive. Multiple years of photos all re-keyworded. Except this time, I think I got it right. I’m now using Adobe Bridge for my keywording/archiving. It’s simpler and more intuitive than idImager, and best of all, Bridge is already a major element of my workflow. I can keyword my photos as soon as they come out of editing. (The physical process of applying keywords is even much faster and easier.)
Searching for photos in Bridge is also easier, with many criteria to choose from beyond just keywords. And because of the way the keywords are stored, I can plug the drive into any computer running Bridge and still search the archive without having to load any additional files/software. No more intermediate database to get in the way!
In the end, this was something of a blessing, even though it took several evenings of work to get everything working again. Rebuilding the archive gave me the chance to review my entire body of photographic work. I cleaned out some stuff that was complete junk and rediscovered some gems in the process. And I have a superior system in the end, which will result in significant time-savings.
I hope anyone reading this takes two things away with them: first, the importance of having an archive as a way to not only preserve, but also access, your collective work; second, some idea of one solution to the problem of creating said archive. I’ve had Bridge almost as long as I’ve had an archive, and I only wish that I had done it this way from the start. It would have saved weeks worth of overall labor. So hopefully someone out there will learn from my mistake.
****For the record, I want to make it clear that this is not a statement against idImager’s software. Their program offers many, many features, the bulk of which I never bothered to use. For me, it was purely archiving software. In the end it turned out not to be the best solution for me. But plenty of people decide they don’t like Bridge, or Lightroom, or ACDsee. idImager is another option, and a good one, to explore.
