Hi all,
Various DAM tools have the concept of both keywords and "Collections" (although each tool has its own name for collections; iMatch, for example, calls them categories). Some tools implements Collections significantly better than others.
With the release of Lightroom, these two organisational tools have been introduced to many people who haven't as of yet embraced the possibilites of Digital Asset Management. To help those who remain confused, I thought I'd try to to explain my take on the differences, with respect the Lightroom's approach.
When should you be using keywords in preference to Collections? The choice isn't necessarily clear-cut, however a well organised library will probably use both keywords and collections. Each method had its own advantages, and the choice of whether to add a new keyword or to create a new collection should be based upon the future use of the word in question. Here are some of the main differences between the two:
From the above it would seem that keywording offers many more advantages than the Collections structure, and for many they may prove the most convenient method of cataloguing photos. There are various tutorials on-line that show keywords being used in a hierarchical structure to organise photos by person and place. Something like this:
> People
The advantage: It's easy to find photos of people by typing them into the Find Panel. With collections, you'd need to find the "Bob" collection to locate all the photos of him, which may take more time (all bit it only a little more, if the collections are well organised).
The disadvantages:
1) Are "People" or "Location" useful keywords? Is one ever likely to search for photos using the word "Location"? Probably not. If we don't want to pollute the keywording with these parent names, you need to turn off exportation of the parents for each and every sub-keyword that's added to the category. This would be painstaking.
2) Will the photos ever be supplied to a third party, such as a stock agency? If so, then personal keywords such as these will need to be removed. "Bob" is meaningless to anyone who doesn't know who Bob is. You could turn off the exportation of this particular keyword, but again this would be a fairly painstaking approach to the problem.
3) The resulting search can't be ordered, which may have proved useful for creating slideshows at a later date.
Given the above, it's for each person to consider the fors and againsts for each method, and to use the tool in the way that's best for them. I would however recommend the following approach:
1) Use collections to group photos that intrinsically belong together, creating sub-collections as needed. Examples include photos of friends and family, all black and white images, photos for a particular client, all photos submitted to a stock collection, all finished fine art prints, etc.
2) Don't create collections for information that's already provided by the metadata. For example, the IPTC metadata already allows you to store the country, state and location in which a photos was taken, and is conveniently extracted by the metadata browser. Sometimes the difference can be subtle; for example, it would be reasonable to have a collection called "Trips" sub divided into difference excursions, but having a collection called "Locations" and would be reinventing the wheel. In the case of "Trips", you may clearly want to distinguish your first trip to Europe from your second - it isn't the location that you're cataloguing, it's the trip itself.
3) Use keywords to describe the impersonal aspects of an image. For example, use "cat" but not "freddy". Basically, use the words that you'd expect an outsider to use to find your image. Stock photographers and journalists will understand this approach well. Since the keywords are exported with the photo as part of the metadata, this makes the photos easy to find and index by those that'll be using the photo at a later date.
4) Use lots of keywords. The richer your database, the easier it will be to find photos at a later date.
5) Use the hierarchical keywording to increase your efficiency, not to slow it down. For example, you may have a structure such as this:
> Animal
Now when you type "cat", the implied keywords "Mammal" and "Animal" will be exported automatically. Usefully, you'll see these parent keywords appear in the implied keywords pane.
6) Wherever possible, try to avoid having the same keyword in several places. If there's only one "cat", Lightroom will find it when you type it into the keyword pane. If there are several, it will only choose one of them, and it may not be the most appropriate. Sometimes this division isn't possible, especially if the word has multiple meanings; for example, keeping an eye on the implied keywords pane as you add new keywords to an image will ensure that you don't add the implied keyword "tubing" instead of "tabacco" when you type in "pipe". Where this problem oocurs, you'll need to find the correct version of the keyword and drag it to your image.
7) Make good use of synonyms. One obvious way to do this may be to add the plural form to each keyword.
8) Think to the future. If you're not selling stock today then the choice of keywording or using collections may seem less important. If one day you decide to try selling your photos through a stock agency then you'll be glad to have correctly keyworded images.
Remember that due to the database, keywords can be modified or corrected at any time, and that the changes will be applied to all the affected photographs. To ease the pain of organising and adding synonyms to your photos you may consider the following:
1) Have a top level category called "Organised" (or "Organized" if you so prefer). Set it to not be exported with the photo, so that your photos aren't all exported with that word.
2) Add new keywords to images using your preferred method. They will be added to the top level.
3) From time to time, go through all the new keywords in the top level of your hierarchy and place them into the correct place in the "Organised" hierarchy, and add any synonyms to them.
This approach will mean that you can first concentrate on keywording your images, and then polish up the details at a later date. The disadvantage is that the keywords pane will show Organised > before every keyword. You may prefer to call this something a little less blatent, such as "O".
Tim
Various DAM tools have the concept of both keywords and "Collections" (although each tool has its own name for collections; iMatch, for example, calls them categories). Some tools implements Collections significantly better than others.
With the release of Lightroom, these two organisational tools have been introduced to many people who haven't as of yet embraced the possibilites of Digital Asset Management. To help those who remain confused, I thought I'd try to to explain my take on the differences, with respect the Lightroom's approach.
When should you be using keywords in preference to Collections? The choice isn't necessarily clear-cut, however a well organised library will probably use both keywords and collections. Each method had its own advantages, and the choice of whether to add a new keyword or to create a new collection should be based upon the future use of the word in question. Here are some of the main differences between the two:
- Keywords may be exported as XMP metadata when exporting a file.
- Keywords may be stored as XMP metadata in (or in a sidecar file of) the original file. If the database becomes corrupted, your keywords are still intact.
- Each keyword may have a list of synonyms that are exported with it.
- Keywords may be used as search criteria from within the "Find" panel
- There are many more ways of applying keywords to a file than there are of placing images in collections. They may be typed into the right-hand keyword pane, applied from the keyword templates, applied using the keyword stamper, or dragged and dropped from the left-hand panel. Keywording is rapid.
- Collections on the other hand are like virtual folders. As such, they have their own image ordering; this maybe useful for for a slideshow, where you want to control the order of the photos when showing a wedding to the client. Also, the image flags (flagged, unflagged and rejected) are local to each collection.
From the above it would seem that keywording offers many more advantages than the Collections structure, and for many they may prove the most convenient method of cataloguing photos. There are various tutorials on-line that show keywords being used in a hierarchical structure to organise photos by person and place. Something like this:
> People
> Mike
> Bob
> Phil
> Location> Bob
> Phil
> China
> Ukraine
> Disney Land
Is this a good use of keywords? The same structure could be done using collections. Let's look in more detail. > Ukraine
> Disney Land
The advantage: It's easy to find photos of people by typing them into the Find Panel. With collections, you'd need to find the "Bob" collection to locate all the photos of him, which may take more time (all bit it only a little more, if the collections are well organised).
The disadvantages:
1) Are "People" or "Location" useful keywords? Is one ever likely to search for photos using the word "Location"? Probably not. If we don't want to pollute the keywording with these parent names, you need to turn off exportation of the parents for each and every sub-keyword that's added to the category. This would be painstaking.
2) Will the photos ever be supplied to a third party, such as a stock agency? If so, then personal keywords such as these will need to be removed. "Bob" is meaningless to anyone who doesn't know who Bob is. You could turn off the exportation of this particular keyword, but again this would be a fairly painstaking approach to the problem.
3) The resulting search can't be ordered, which may have proved useful for creating slideshows at a later date.
Given the above, it's for each person to consider the fors and againsts for each method, and to use the tool in the way that's best for them. I would however recommend the following approach:
1) Use collections to group photos that intrinsically belong together, creating sub-collections as needed. Examples include photos of friends and family, all black and white images, photos for a particular client, all photos submitted to a stock collection, all finished fine art prints, etc.
2) Don't create collections for information that's already provided by the metadata. For example, the IPTC metadata already allows you to store the country, state and location in which a photos was taken, and is conveniently extracted by the metadata browser. Sometimes the difference can be subtle; for example, it would be reasonable to have a collection called "Trips" sub divided into difference excursions, but having a collection called "Locations" and would be reinventing the wheel. In the case of "Trips", you may clearly want to distinguish your first trip to Europe from your second - it isn't the location that you're cataloguing, it's the trip itself.
3) Use keywords to describe the impersonal aspects of an image. For example, use "cat" but not "freddy". Basically, use the words that you'd expect an outsider to use to find your image. Stock photographers and journalists will understand this approach well. Since the keywords are exported with the photo as part of the metadata, this makes the photos easy to find and index by those that'll be using the photo at a later date.
4) Use lots of keywords. The richer your database, the easier it will be to find photos at a later date.
5) Use the hierarchical keywording to increase your efficiency, not to slow it down. For example, you may have a structure such as this:
> Animal
> Mammal
> Cat
> Dog
> Dog
> Fish
> Shark
6) Wherever possible, try to avoid having the same keyword in several places. If there's only one "cat", Lightroom will find it when you type it into the keyword pane. If there are several, it will only choose one of them, and it may not be the most appropriate. Sometimes this division isn't possible, especially if the word has multiple meanings; for example, keeping an eye on the implied keywords pane as you add new keywords to an image will ensure that you don't add the implied keyword "tubing" instead of "tabacco" when you type in "pipe". Where this problem oocurs, you'll need to find the correct version of the keyword and drag it to your image.
7) Make good use of synonyms. One obvious way to do this may be to add the plural form to each keyword.
8) Think to the future. If you're not selling stock today then the choice of keywording or using collections may seem less important. If one day you decide to try selling your photos through a stock agency then you'll be glad to have correctly keyworded images.
Remember that due to the database, keywords can be modified or corrected at any time, and that the changes will be applied to all the affected photographs. To ease the pain of organising and adding synonyms to your photos you may consider the following:
1) Have a top level category called "Organised" (or "Organized" if you so prefer). Set it to not be exported with the photo, so that your photos aren't all exported with that word.
2) Add new keywords to images using your preferred method. They will be added to the top level.
3) From time to time, go through all the new keywords in the top level of your hierarchy and place them into the correct place in the "Organised" hierarchy, and add any synonyms to them.
This approach will mean that you can first concentrate on keywording your images, and then polish up the details at a later date. The disadvantage is that the keywords pane will show Organised > before every keyword. You may prefer to call this something a little less blatent, such as "O".
Tim
