Organising and storing 200000 photographs.

My organisation has 200,000 photographs and adds 20,000+ each year. The photographs are taken by staff who are not photographers and the staff place the into folders, eg:

W:\2010\area 1\subject 1\
W:\2010\area 1\subject 2\
W:\2010\area 1\subject 3\ etc.

Though a few staff rename their photos to give more information, most do not, so finding photos that are a few years old is difficult unless we know the area and subject. Eg: have we got a photograph of John Smith from 2005? Only if we know the supporting information.

What I am looking for is a photograph database where we can tag and organise our photos. An online solution might be difficult for security reasons.

Can anyone suggest a suitable solution

Lightroom

Gatorboy wrote in post #11563188
Lightroom

Ditto.

Ditto II

I use Lightroom with tons of collections and sets and keywords. I also use a very intense set of folders on top of it all.

Lightroom is a good tool for a single user on one computer. If your organization needs to have media at multiple locations or accesible by multiple users you will need a more advanced Digital Asset Management system like Canto, Extensis, or ImageFolio.

Reguardless, its essential to create policies for standardized file names and ITPC keywords when the images are stored. These are the key to minimizing the herculean task of managing 200000 pics from different sources.

-Scott

We use picasa. It's not the best, but it's simple/open source/works and is used by multiple people.

Even though I've been a Lightroom user since its first beta in 2006, I wouldn't suggest it unless you also intend to use it for image editing which from your brief description does not appear to be the case.

Instead take a look at an application like IDimager Pro or IDimager Pro for SQL Server. Lightroom is a single user application while IDimager is much more scaleable, scriptable, and also allows multiple concurrent users accessing its database(s) simultaneously. See here: http://www.idimager.co​m/

I'd also suggest you ask over at a forum like The DAM Forum where they have much more knowledge about Digital Asset Management and wouldn't just suggest an application because of its popularity: http://thedambook.com/​smf/index.php

Take it from someone who managed an image library of 400,000 transparencies without any kind of database, other than my own gray matter. (Read: Job security) The first lesson I learned when working with a database; the information and search results you will get out will depend totally on the quality of the information going in. Think first about what you want to get out; that will guide you on what to put in. Regardless of the database, keywords and other metadata will be of paramount importance. Good Luck.

Extensis Portfolio works well and the server option allows for multiple users (can be pricey though)

http://www.extensis.co​m …lioserver9-5/features.jsp

Yes, I agree, Lightroom is good.

Unless you have a pretty powerful computer you might want to organize into yearly archives, creating a different catalog for each year. The only problem with this is that you will have to know the year, to find the picture, or may need to open and search several catalogs, to find what you are looking for.

The reason for this, is that LR slows down a lot when you have a lot of images in a catalog. I've been updating my 2008 catalog just recently with LR3 and it's been struggling with 100,000 images from that year (probably half are duplicates such as thumbnails or finished prints from images, I didn't shoot 100K, probably more like 45-50K).

In Lightroom you can do all sorts of things pretty easily. It allows for batch processing, too.... for example you could highlight a number of images and add the same tag to all of them, or rate/sort them with one to five stars, and/or color code them.

You can view them by date & time taken, or sorted in a wide variety of other ways.

You can view the entire year as one giant catalog, or look at just particular folders within the catalog, mirroring your folder structure in your computer.

There are lots of possibilities and some good books that are a big help learning to use Lightroom. There are several modules in addition the cataloging Library, which you may or may not find useful: Develop (non-destructive image adjustments), Slideshow, Print and Web. I use Develop all the time, and Print and Slideshow frequently.

amfoto1 wrote in post #11571770
Yes, I agree, Lightroom is good.

Unless you have a pretty powerful computer you might want to organize into yearly archives, creating a different catalog for each year. The only problem with this is that you will have to know the year, to find the picture, or may need to open and search several catalogs, to find what you are looking for.

Great idea, I actually am doing that starting in 2011.

I just re-did mine a couple years ago for the external drives...

Main categories like...

Editorial
Youth & High School
Travel

Then sub-categories...

Editorial
Baselball 2009
- MLB - NY Mets 2009
- Wright, David (organized by player)
- Glavine, Tom
- MiLB - Batavia Muckdogs 2009
Football 2009
- Bills vs Browns 11.19.09 (organized by game)
- Steelers vs Bears 11.26.09
- etc.

It's at least 4-5 levels deep for most and can find images in seconds flat though. ALSO, have been tagging images ever since re-organizing so everything is tagged with info if there needs to be a search. Most of the keepers from 2003-present is online with PhotoShetler and searchable though have a few years to go and get up there.

All the information you need is in the (DAM) Digital Asset Management book. Cataloging, software, backup methodology, storage solutions, metadata, hardware, derivative management, file migration, software compatibility and data sharing, etc. Its a very deep subject, and the more you images you have, the more questions that will crop up.

There is nothing worse than finding yourself in a mess later because the storage and cataloging were thrown together without a clear insight into the future. What may seem logical and easy today, could cause a huge headache down the road. Its really best to take a month or two to really explore the asset management requirements, and then set a solution in motion. The DAM book will really get you set in the right direction.

As for Lightroom, perhaps. Its easy for today, but it was never designed as a cataloging product. There are shortcomings and limitations that can be a big set back later on down the road. I love Lightroom and use it extensively on a daily basis, but only for current work. Once projects are completed, they get archived and cataloged with archival software (such as Portfolio Extensis, Media Expressions, etc). Those programs handle more than just images, and will catalog all your media even if you shoot images, video, audio, and so on. They are also so much faster than Lightroom, but also compatible with Lightroom in a partner type scenario.

Definitely take the time to really research this. The 10 hours spent now could save you 100 hours later in file migration, fixing metadata compatibility issues, and so on.

Good advice from Stephen and others. This sounds like a project that would benefit from a collaboration between your IT folks and the department in charge of managing the assets. I would look at the long term needs for storage, back-up, search & retrieval, data growth, etc. Long term in my thinking is 10 or more years. The data belongs on the network, not a bunch of portable drives etc.