The Dam Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers (O'Reilly Digital Studio)

Overall, this is a good book that thoroughly covers all the essentials of putting together a system and practices to organize and preserve your photo collection.On the hardware side, he shows excessively expensive harddrive setups, when 2TB Western Digital MyBooks are dropping under $500. (Such statements are always relative to the date they're made -- 18 months from now that might be 4TB for $400.) I do agree with some comments he makes about RAID not being such a hot idea. The increasing size of individual drives is making the time it takes to reconstruct a failed drive in a RAID configuration reach absurd levels. When it took five or more drives to assemble 1TB, RAID seemed pretty clever. It's time has passed.On the software side, he pushes Bridge plus iView MediaPro. That may have been the hot setup when the book was published, but Lightroom is gaining converts at a high rate. A 2nd edition revised to center on Lightroom would be good. At the very least, he'd need to explain exactly what Bridge + iView MediaPro can do that Lightroom can't and why it matters. I believe Lightroom alone offers a much less convoluted system then that combination.Finally, for a book whose entire point is organizing and preserving photos, it has a curious hole. If your photo archive is all of your family's pictures, as opposed to a wedding photography business, how do you ensure it will outlive you? He makes a few remarks about how having things well organized will make it easier for your family, but that's it. Thinking about such things proves I'm getting to be an old fart, but it strikes me as a major omission in a book on this subject.My criticisms shouldn't detract from my original statement -- it's overall a good book. Even if I don't follow his exact hardware and software recommendations, he made me think through whether my combination was completely sound. I've changed how I was doing some things, and changed some of my ideas about what I plan to do in the future, as a result. It's the best and most thorough book on the subject available to date.

I am a fairly serious photographer- with over 5000 cataloged images stored in iViewPro. I also use Photoshop CS2- so I have pretty much the same setup as Peter Krogh uses for his book. I probably shoot a couple hundred images a month, of which maybe 5% get archived and saved.The best thing about this book is it describes, in detail, one whole methodology for setting up a reasonable system for storing, naming, cataloging, backing-up, rating, and organizing photos. I would much rather a book that describes one method, rather than trying to describe every possible methods and the tradeoffs of each. Krogh describes how he does it, why he did it that way, and what the advantages an disadvantages were. You may object to some of his choices- (I am not a fan of digital negatives), but opinions are like you know what...everybody has one.If you use the same software that Krough uses, you will be very satisfied with his book. If you use others (Photoshop downrevs, ACDSEE, etc), I can see the book being a bit of a disappointment. However, since I use the same tools (and these probably cost close to $1000 to duplicate), the price of the book was easily made up in just a couple of the hints.I do have one complaint. The interface between CS2 and iVIEW is clunky in that it doesn't point to the same metadata for some fields- specifically the star rankings. Krogh suggests a number of work-arounds, none of which I really liked. None of that is Krogh's fault- Microsoft and Adobe need to have a meeting. However the one thing that really annoyed me was that Krogh offered one script to address the problem, which is offered on his website for a fee- don't remember the exact amount- $20 seems to ring a bell.If there is one thing I hate, it is laying out cash for a methodology book, only to be hit up again for downloading a script.If stuff like that doesn't bother you- I wholeheartedly recommend the book, subject to your having the same toolset. If stuff like that bothers you- hold your nose and buy it anyway.

For someone who used to store all there metadata in html files, this book gave some much needed information.For those who look to this book to answer all their questions, it won't. You need some actual logic and photographic knowledge to make use of this book.I've seen complaints about the file structure recommendations this book pushes, but some people obviously didn't read the book, just skimmed. The main premise of this book is to stop relying on where the file is stored on what drive and puts importance on what the file actually IS. This makes finding the right needle in a smaller haystack of images that can span a decade. By assigning time, keywords, ratings, and other metadata to your images they are actually usable.Over the last 3 weeks I moved over a database of film (240 rolls, about 8000 images) and am finally making sense of the last 4 years of shooting because of this book.Krogh's preference for DNG is well justified, as is his use of Adobe Bridge/Camera RAW. AFAIK there is no other solution that properly catalogs raw files after exposure/color modifications. NONE. Get over it. XMP and DNG is why I think its outright stupid to use any other raw converter.Hardware choices are generally correct, especially the distaste of RAID. I'd rather have four indipendent backed up disks than 5 disks running in one box that I can't turn on/off individually (wearing the disk down) with a common failure point PSU that I can't remove from the failed case and put into another if everything falls apart at the last moment. RAID is very risky.Ignore part of the Camera RAW chapter, read Bruce Fraser's book instead.Read the iView manual, because this is not an iView guide, just an explaination of logical concepts.This has been the best book for the continuing usefulness of my digital archives. Buy it, steal it, just read it.

One of the best books on this subject I have read, good as an introduction and helpful to those like me who have worked in IT and software but gives it a photographic approach.

A great book for any serious photographer in todays world. A fantastic guideline to help any budding pro to organise workflow and at a great price