Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Once you have imported your photos then it is a good idea to organise them so that individual images can be found easily afterwards. (This is not necessary if you only have a few images stored on a hard drive. However once the number creeps up into the hundreds or thousands then organisation is very important!)

Software that helps you organise your photos (or any media, such as movies or music) is known as Digital Asset Management (DAM) software. Apple’s Photos and Adobe Lightroom both have DAM elements, though these are less suited to keeping track of non-image files.

Good DAM software should help make routine tasks easier. These include (but are not limited to) renaming images and copying or moving images around your PC or Mac. Ideally you should also be able to add keywords and descriptions to images too, though this can often be done at the import or post-production stage too. Adding keywords and descriptions to your photos is particularly useful, as this makes the searching of particular photos within the DAM software easier.

Keywords and descriptions are text that is added to the metadata of photos. Metadata is ‘hidden’ data in a photo that can be read and displayed by suitable software. (Camera settings such as the exposure settings used to create a photo, as well as the date and time the photo was taken, are also saved in metadata – though these are added automatically by the camera.) If you add keywords to a photo you should use only keywords that are relevant to that particular photo. Keywords can include very specific terms such as the location that the photo was taken, as well as useful terms such as predominant colours in the photos or weather conditions. A description is a short sentence or two that describes the subject of the photo.