August 31, 2004

DAM

I recently purchased Extensis Portfolio. It's DAM software (industry jargon for digital asset management) that will help me organize my thousands of digital photographs.

I (briefly) floundered through the manual which describes how to use the features in the software, but doesn't give advice on how to set up your folders, files, keywords, categories, etc. I suppose this is because best practice will vary from user to user depending on what your "workflow" (more current industry jargon) is like.

After a few days of Google searching and posting to forums, I came across the most excellent Portfolio FAQ. The site contains enough info to make you an expert Porfolio user should you have time to digest it all. And the two moderators respond to posts within hours, sometimes minutes...even on the weekends.

I also bought a massive 500 gig LaCie external drive on which to store all these photo files. The thought was that I could get rid of my stacks of CDs, but numerous warnings have come in saying that I should make sure to have a back-up (or two) of all the files. So much for consolidation.