Photo Management: A Million Memories

Added "workaround" paragraph, 20170208

Photo management software is a Godsend for packrats like me.  It’s also valuable for anyone who wants to find a particular photo in their collection in seconds rather than minutes… or months.  The routine upfront work required to maintain such a managed database of photos is surprisingly minimal, at least from my experience using Adobe Lightroom as a photo manager.  The biggest challenge is deciding how to both “store” and “organize” one’s own photos.  To understand the difference, see the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) article on File Management, and particularly its “Storage vs. Organization” section, at

http://www.dpbestflow.org/file-management/file-management-overview. 

One thing to realize is that after spending years organizing tens of thousands of photos on one brand of photo management software, there may not be an easy way to fully migrate the “organizational” structure to the next best brand coming down the pike.  The geeky explanation and manually intensive workaround for this is below.

BTW, the Library of Congress funded the ASMP to document Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow (dpBestflow®).  See their comprehensive best practices page at http://www.dpbestflow.org/links/32.  Though this was written for the professional, much is useful for the eager beginner and amateur.

Migrating from One Photo Management System to Another

Some of the organizational structure of a photo management database will be established via metadata, e.g., the photos of Aunt Betsy will not be contained in a folder named "Aunt Betsy," but within a folder structure based on simpler, unrelated storage hierarchies, e.g., by camera or date.  But Aunt Betsy’s photos will be quickly accessible via a metadata tag (a “keyword”) named "Aunt Betsy" which is known to the photo management system.  The keyword can also be written to the DNG, RAW sidecar and JPG files, but any keyword hierarchy information will be lost.  For example, one may establish within Lightroom a keyword hierarchy with "Aunt Betsy" beneath "Family;" but though the photo file will contain the tags "Family" and "Aunt Betsy," there is no standard method for the tags in those photo files to be associated hierarchically.  Thus, if one decides to migrate to a new photo management software system, the new system will recognize the keywords but may not present to the user a hierarchical representation (e.g., a "tree" structure like Microsoft Window's File Manager) of the keywords; in other words, Aunt Betsy may not “appear” to be part of the family. 

A workaround may not be possible, though I’m not sure.  Non-geeks, take a deep breath before reading this paragraph.  Lightroom indicates keyword hierarchy relationships with the “pipe” symbol, a vertical line, e.g., Family | Aunt Betsy (read as “Family pipe Aunt Betsy”) means the keyword “Aunt Betsy” is contained within the hierarchy space of the keyword “Family.”  The sequence “Family | Aunt Betsy” is stored in an image file’s metadata section, but it is stored as an Adobe-specific field; so unless another company’s photo management software recognizes the Adobe field, the hierarchy will be lost.  Here is an example of the field:

<lr:hierarchicalSubject>
    <rdf:Bag>
       <rdf:li>Family|Aunt Betsy</rdf:li>
    </rdf:Bag>
</lr:hierarchicalSubject>

Another major organizational structure of a photo management database is the association of photos with albums or collections.  In Lightroom a collection is not a metadata item associated with a photo; the user must specifically assign an “album name” as a keyword to a photo, just as he would assign any other keyword to a photo.  For example, 1,000 photos may contain the keywords “Riviera” and “Vacation.”  Ten of those photos may also contain “Aunt Betsy.”  One of Aunt Betsy’s photos may also be part of the album “Riviera Vacation Album, 201606.”  But to make sure that a migration to another photo management database system will succeed, each of the photos in the album, including the single one of Aunt Betsy, should also have a keyword with the same name as the album, namely, “Riviera Vacation Album, 201606.”