What kind of DAM process do I use?
Digital Assets Management has been a no-brainer for me since the introduction of Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s response Aperture a couple years ago. A lot has happened since then. Plugins and add-ons emerged to make the workflow easier. Gone are the days of fiddling with folders and finder items, or are they really?

With all the widgets, gadgets and plugins around today, I found myself drifting out of the all-in-one solution basket, towards a more universalist view on how to manage my workflow.

Workflow for a professional photographer can be a headache, as not only there are the jobs, there are also the personal work and family photos to manage. To maintain a chaos-free environment on my macbook, I started following a few steps based on the actual purpose of the job itself: I use all three. Adobe Lightroom is essential as I allows me to manage my catalogs without interfering with the way I like my folders setup. The first thing I did was to deny LR from messing with my folder locations, but on the other hand, I allow it to categorize the jobs by date. LR does for me what photoshop can do, and even more, much faster and in a non-destructive manner.

Aperture can do that too, but I mainly use it because it has a far more attractive book printing package. Some clients require books – This is what I prefer to work with, even if the customization levels go a bit beyond the typical usage.

I said all three, didn’t I? Yes. I have recently re-adopted a formerly discarded tool into my personal workflow. iPhoto ’09 seems to be more efficient than any of the above in managing family vacation images, including sharing on facebook, flickr, emailing etc. Although the image editing capabilities are a bit, to say the least, weak, family events typically don’t require a lot of postmortem work. Besides, my new obsession with geo-tagging has been fed a new candy with iphoto ’09 maps implementation.

Stay tuned for the next post highlighing my Adobe Lightroom Setup.

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