CATALOGUING AND ARCHIVING

A brief video extract from this workshop’s Preservation Strategies session on the dedication, responsibility and creativity involved in tending to your own files, including their storage, organisation, and preservation.

WORKSHOP BOOKINGS

TUTORIALS

DETAILED WORKSHOP OVERVIEW

This workshop is dedicated to the responsibility and creativity involved in tending to your own files, including their organisation, storage, retrieval, archiving and preservation. For the creation of high quality images and their storage and access isn’t antithetical to their preservation. Professional cataloguing applications such as Adobe Lightroom Classic, or Neofinder (Mac) or abeMeda (Win), or Capture One are incorporated into a practical and streamlined workflow, where solutions to real world problems are addressed, such as not being able to find an image, or associate or work with multiple versions of the same image, let alone how to accomplish all of this without losing your way.  And while ideally your catalogue and archive should be something you setup once and then benefit from, sadly this is not always the case. So strategies for correcting mistakes are also required, including identifying and rationalising duplicate files/catalogue entries, restoring broken links, and identifying compromised backups.

An Individual Consultation is included to ensure the workshop content is customised to your specific requirements, while our weekly In-Person Tutorials, live‑streamed over ZOOM, provide an opportunity to catch up and support you in your workflow. Our objective is to instil world’s best practice in solving and preventing problems, while boosting your confidence in cataloguing and archiving as a desirable, achievable, worthwhile, and easily maintained undertaking.

The workshop is presented in six recorded sessions plus tutorials, and is supported through weekly Zoom Tutorials and extensive resources – Notes, Case Studies, Workflows – covering the following topics in a fully searchable database and accessed without restriction via the Workshop’s Resource Website.

Process Principles
• Where to start?
• Designing a workflow – components and compromises
• File sizes, image compression, destination requirements
• Understanding JPEG, TIFF, PSD, DNG, and RAW file formats
• Propriety versus open source standards
• Integrating applications into an archiving workflow

Ingesting
• Catalogues versus session folders
• Libraries versus browsers
• Importing, sorting, tagging, renaming
• Histories, presets, and search engines
• DNG archiving workflows
• Database management

Metadata
•  EXIF, IPTC-Keywords, XMP
•  Metadata formats, standards and nomenclature
•  Metadata templates and presets
•  The art of file naming
•  Watched folders and smart collections

Preservation Strategies
• Getting it right the first time
•  Assets versus Derivatives
•  Working files versus Archived files
•  Software Redundancy
•  Hardware Redundancy
•  Identifying and rationalising duplicate files

Archiving Solutions
•  Selecting Hard Drives – Enterprise/Pro
•  HD and SSD drive failure data
•  DAS versus NAS and UPS solutions
•  Single versus dual disk redundancy
•  RAID (0, 1, 5, 10) and Beyond-RAID storage systems
•  Cloud storage solutions

Traveling Solutions
•  Presets, LUTs, Styles, and Keyword Lists
•  Parent-Child folder strategies
•  Backing up and processing images while traveling
•  Working across multiple workstations and locations
•  Importing Travel Catalogues into a Master Catalogue
•  Synchronising metadata and process settings