Monthly Archives: July 2010

Book Review: Digital Asset Management for Photographers

Posted on by
1

Digital Asset Management for Photographers - Peter KroghOne of the best books for any aspiring photographer is “The DAM Book – Digital Asset Management for Photographers” by Peter Krogh.  In this book, Peter highlights the Prime Directive and Other Goals for photographers as follows:

The Prime Directive:

  • Don’t lose the images

Other Goals:

  • Find images when you need them
  • Save time
  • Make the images look right
  • Software independence
  • Ensure forward compatibility

These are really rules which any photographer of any standard should try and follow.  The good news is that DAD can help you do all of these, except for “making the images look right” for which you will need specialist editing software.

Taking each in turn:

Don’t lose the images. DAD incorporates an easy to use Backup, Archive and Synchronisation process.  Using DAD, you can copy your photographs, wherever they are, however organised or disorganised they may be on your computer disks, to other safe locations.  This DAD process can be manual or automatic and is very easy to set up.

Find images when you need them. So, you’ve got images on one or more of your computers.  How do you find them?  The answer is ‘easily’, using the DAD Index, which allows you to find any image quickly.  You can search not only by filename, but by any title you’ve given an image, any tag or any other attribute of the photograph, e.g. date, camera type, location, etc.  And, if your image is on a backup/archive disk, then no problem.  Unlike most other back/archive products, DAD will keep an index of what you have backed up and to where.  You no longer have to remember and trawl thorough lots of CDs or remote disks – just query the DAD Index and you’ll have the answer instantly.

Save Time DAD has lots of time saving features for any level of photographer.  This includes the ability to organise your photographs rapidly into albums and to share your photographs quickly and easily.  (Plus, you can do this automatically, based on easy to set rules – saving you time over and over again).  With DAD, you can also backup and sync those photographs automatically, quickly find and display any photograph(s) – and more.

Software Independence One of the greatest strengths of DAD is how it frees your data and ensures this data is not locked within one particular software program.  Many people would like to annotate their photographs with tags, e.g. who is in the photo, where the photo was taken, what the event was etc.  They spend hours and hours in a in a particular software program doing this tagging.  They also like to organise their photographs into albums and use software programs to do this.  However, when they want to share their photographs, disaster  They can’t share the tags they spent so long entering as these can only be viewed in the program in which they were created.  Or, they may want to use a newer and better software program to organise their photographs but, disaster again.  All their prior organisation is lost and all that effort tagging is lost too.

Surely this must be unacceptable? – well we think it is.  That is why DAD provides the one index that can be used by any program so that you never need to retag or reorganise your photographs ever again.  AND, any tags you have created will be shared too when you share a photograph through DAD.

Get true software independence with DAD.

Ensure forward compatibility The Software Independence feature of DAD means your tags, other information (known as Metadata) and your organisation is held in our central index.  So, with DAD, you are not locked into one particular data format either.  Our index format, which is based on international standards as far as possible, will remain open forever, allowing you to tag and organise once and use forever.

DAD Vision – The Semantic Desktop

Posted on by
1

It is the beginning of July and we are just about to launch DAD – so what is it and what is our vision?

As you have access to ever more technology, you probably create and consume increasing volumes of digital ‘stuff’ – photos, music, words, contact details, that sort of thing.  You use programs and web applications to enhance and share this stuff, but this causes even more disorganisation as your data is everywhere and enhancements made in one place cannot be used in another.  DAD creates a central index of all your digital stuff, bringing organisation from chaos, allowing you to view all your files.  You can then reuse enhancements and links you’ve made between your stuff in any program that is DAD aware.

All programs and web applications today create their own databases to hold your digital data and require a high degree of expertise, or tedious copy and paste type actions, to take this data from one program to another.  In our vision, all applications and web apps will either use the DAD index directly or will provide bridges to a your DAD index, so that you always have a central index of your data and any enhancements made to that data wherever the enhancements may have been created.

Once you have everything indexed and linked the uses to which it can be put are numerous.  Out of the box DAD gives you private and secure sharing capabilities – manually or automatically via its built in rules engine. You can for example have your music available on multiple computers, send photos to friends just by tagging them, synchronise photos taken on holiday in 2010 with your family to create the perfect holiday photo album or set up the perfect backup solution by sending your precious digital memories to multiple computers and devices. In fact the list of things you can get DAD to do is limited only by your imagination. We will be working with 3rd party developers, who have full access to the DAD API, to ensure there’s always something new and helpful waiting for you.

As an example: I have a photo on my computer.  I want to share that directly with some users via DAD, but also share on Facebook.  On Facebook, friends tag that photo with other friends who are in the photo and add comments.  To get all the data on that photo today I have to look at email and Facebook separately – all aspects of that photo are not linked.  With DAD and a 3rd party application linking Facebook to DAD, I can have all aspects of that photo available to me in my DAD Index to view, reuse, share as I wish.

The Semantic Web is a major initiative which will give many benefits to users across the web.  DAD is the Semantic Desktop and it is here now.