Using Lightroom

I recently discovered the joys of using Adobe Lightroom 2.1 while cataloging several thousand photos for Bush Telly.

Most of the pictures were on Cd's or hard drives in folders named after the photographer along with a note. As the pile of images grew rapidly, it was getting chaotic pretty fast.

So a good bit of
Digital Asset Management (DAM) was needed.

The DAM Book by Peter Krough found in the local library explained a clear method of naming digital photos and what directory structure to use. I had to post a few queries on The DAM Forum to clarify what structure might be needed to deal with fifty different photographers instead of only one. Peter and friends were very helpful.

After the images were sorted, I used Lightroom to add metadata to each image and then exported them as a master DNG files named using this format;

<PhotographerFirstNameLastName>_<YYYYMMDD>_<SequenceNumber>.dng

So an example would be SashaShamilov_2010227_02.dng

Lightroom was a real pleasure to use especially with twin monitors. It made the whole job easy and it looks beautiful too - I'm hooked.