The DAM Book by Peter Krogh: Review

Digital Asset Management is a very broad term for nearly everything that we do with digital photos after capturing them with a camera or scanner. This includes everything from importing them to the computer, naming the resulting digital files, organizing the files on disk, adding metadata to describe the images, creation of edited images, backup of images, an a great deal more. In short, it is a large and complex topic. It is difficult to know where to begin.

The Bottom Line

Though this book was published several years ago, the lay of the land has not changed drastically. This is still the best introduction to DAM methodologies available. An update of the book to include new software packages like Adobe Lightroom and Apple Apeture would be welcome. (We will review several other DAM books in the future.)

The rating: 4 Stars.

Summary: Though it includes some discussion of specific software and techniques that not everyone will find useful, this book is a great introduction to digital asset management.

Detailed Review

A variety of digital asset management books are available. Most are written for corporate and institutional users who are already dealing with large volumes of images or other media, need to distribute the media widely (often globally), and have access, privacy, security and legal issues that require heavy lifting to address. This book by Peter Krogh is written at a more accessible level and is focused solely on digital photography for a home or small studio.

Overall, this book is a great way to start thinking about DAM and how you can make it fit into your photography and computer use. Though it doesn't hit a home run on every page, it is a worthwhile read that will put you on the path to understanding and implementing DAM methods in your world. Mr. Krogh should be commended for writing such an informative and useful book.

• Chapter 1: What is all this DAM stuff? This chapter motivates the rest of the book and tries to convince you that implementing a sound DAM policy is smart. The analogy that the author uses to color management is not my favorite and won't necessarily make sense to many readers who don't understand the complexities of either DAM or color management. Krogh is appealing to already established photographers more than novices with this discussion. Krogh pushes the benefits of the DNG file format and it's ties to DAM. This discussion makes sense, but applies mostly to photographers who choose to shoot in RAW camera format. This is a very beneficial thing to do for some photographers. Most users of digital cameras, however, shoot with cameras that that are not capable of producing RAW images - and even their cameras could do it, shooting in RAW format would be a mistake for most people who would rarely (never?) do any post shoot image processing. For these shooters, RAW and a conversion to DNG as the author proposes would bear little fruit and complicate matters for an already struggling group of people. TIFF and JPEG files have most of the useful properties of DNG that the author enumerates, most critically the ability to embed IPTC metadata.
  
• Chapter 2: Metadata. This chapter describes what metadata is, how it is used and why you should care. Krogh provides a rather extensive description of his methods of using metadata for ratings, keywords, and groupings of images. This is not directly applicable to many workflows, but is very useful in framing the discussion of metadata and getting you thinking about how you will use the tools at hand.
  
• Chapter 3: Creating the Digital Archive Part 1: The Information Structure. This chapter discusses the physical layout of files on disk and the naming of files. Krogh gives his recommendations, which I believe are mostly sensible and sound. His approach to backup is a workable one (create buckets of files sized according to your backup medium), but the methodology gets awkward as backup media change (i.e., move from CD to DVD to Blu-ray to ???). I believe that having to physically organize files on disk in these buckets is awkward and generally not workable for many people shooting digital today. Again, I am thinking about the "average" photographer, not the "average professional photographer". Even non-professionals have need for good backup methodologies. Granted, Krogh is working within the confines of the operating systems and software that are available today, which generally don't make backup easy. However, there are better, automated, ways to get good backup strategies in place that don't force this artificial physical file organization on us.
  
• Chapter 4: Creating the Digital Archive Part 2: Hardware Configurations. This chapter gives a good overview of various hardware technologies that are critical (at this time) to get a solid storage and backup system in place. Computer, network and storage configurations are discussed in detail. There is a lot of detail here that, strictly speaking, is not directly a DAM topic. However, this is background and system design material that is required to implement a truly robust digital asset management system.
  
• Chapter 5: Setting up Bridge. This chapter describes a variety of features of Adobe Bridge and how they relate to DAM. Krogh stresses heavily the use of Adobe Bridge as a tool to realize a good DAM system. There is a lot to be said for this approach; Bridge is a powerful and accessible tool. However, there is a big drawback for many people: not everyone has Bridge nor are they willing to buy Photoshop or another full-featured Adobe product to get it. The ideas discussed here, however, apply to many browser and cataloging systems, so don't let the use of Bridge put you off if you use something else for this purpose. For example, Photoshop Elements can do keyword and caption tagging and write the values to IPTC data (and it cost less than $100).
  
• Chapter 6: The Editing Workflow. This chapter is the most significant meat in the book. It describes the author's workflow from shooting to importing into a cataloging application (covered in the next chapter) in great detail. This is focused on the use of Adobe Bridge for a photographer shooting RAW file formats. However, the ideas that are presented here are easy to apply with other tools or if you are not shooting RAW. Specifically, Krogh outlines his methods of importing, validating, backing up, attaching metadata, and preparing images for import into a cataloging application. The workflow presented here is complete and solid, with many good observations about good practices for backing up, verifying integrity and efficiently processing images.
  
• Chapter 7: Using Cataloging Software. This chapter describes the uses of a cataloging application, using iView as an example. It shows the use of a cataloging software package for many purposes, including using metadata for organization, organizing using virtual sets, outputting web galleries and slide shows, and generating files for review. This focuses on iView as a software package, though the ideas presented here are present in many software packages. The first part of the chapter presents the author's ideas about ideal characteristics of a cataloging software package. This is perhaps the most important part of the chapter as it gives the reader some criteria for deciding what package makes sense for their own use. The chapter ends with three "case studies" showing uses of cataloging software to solve real problems a photographer might face.
  
• Chapter 8: Derivative Files. This chapter describes what derivative files are, how they may be created and how they fit into a DAM system. The author makes the important distinction between original, master, and other files, which need to be treated differently from a DAM (including backup, cataloging, and storage) standpoint. The chapter goes through some very specific examples of using Adobe Bridge and associated scripts like Dr. Brown's Caption Maker and Image Processor to generate images for review proofs, email, etc. It also discusses management of different versions of an image. This is an element that requires ad hoc solutions today as the DAM software that is readily available does not really support versions well. Adobe Lightroom has some interesting versioning support, but it is not as full featured as many photographers would like.
  
• Chapter 9: Strategies for Successful File Migration. This chapter describes how a DAM system can be used to ease concerns about migrating images to a new computer, file format, hard drive, etc. It also discusses moving an existing archive of images into a (new) DAM system. There is some very useful discussion here. The author then discusses migrating from film to digital. For the most part, I think that this material is really out of the scope of this book. Some of the suggestions we disagree with strongly. For example, he suggests that the best way to transfer 35mm film is through a digital SLR with a copy attachment. This will get images into the system, but the quality will not be acceptable most of the time. This is because dust and scratches will be present on every piece of film and the lack of an automated dust and scratch removal technology like ICE will be sorely missed. A dedicated film scanner will do a much better job.