ABSTRACT

O ne of the consequences of working with digital images in Photoshop is that you will soon find yourself struggling to cope with an ever-growing collection of image files, which if you are not careful will consume all the remaining space on your computer’s hard disk. Most people find it necessary to store their image files on separate CD or DVD disks. And the smart photographers will take care to catalog these disks and possibly create an image library database, so that pictures can be organized by categories and retrieved more quickly. I know of a photographer who was asked to ‘go digital’ by his main client. So he bought all the necessary kit, investing a small fortune in digital hardware. However, after a few months, the client said he wanted to go back to

the old days, when he had piles of pictures to flip through. This was all because the client had a hard time tracking down specific images from the growing pile of CD-ROMs. This anecdote highlights a great potential weakness in professional digital capture workflow. If you don’t manage your images efficiently, you will find it incredibly difficult to track them down later from your growing digital archives. Sifting through a disorganized pile of film images is not an ideal solution either of course, but at the end of the day, the pictures must be archived. But the argument can be made that once you do put in the effort to archive and manage your digital files properly, the rewards are great, and you will find you can retrieve your pictures far more easily, using varied search criteria, than you can using a conventional film-based archive. If you are looking for a sophisticated archival retrieval system then consider purchasing an image database program. There are several popular programs that you can buy and I will be discussing these later, but the Bridge program that comes with Photoshop CS2 now boasts a number of powerful new features with which to manage your image files.