DAM – Folder Structure
Digital Asset Management isn’t rocket surgery – you want to find what you’re looking for. What it comes down to is having a system and being consistent about using it. The more specific the rules of your system and the more consistent you are about following those rules, the better your system will work. Which means less work. Which means more productivity. Seems like a no brainer.
What drives me absolutely bonkers is a scenario in which 5 minutes of work stretches to an hour because of lax application of the rules we’ve established. I’ll give an example.
Every job has this folder structure in the Graphics Dept.
This is a screen shot of the folder structure we use in the Graphics dept. at my day job. The wages of 50 people and multimillion dollar advertising campaigns hinge on the fact that we can find what we need when we need it. It’s important stuff. Every job has the exact same folder structure, folders are automatically created by our proprietary DAM software when a job is entered into the system. Everyone in the department knows our workflow and knows where to put what type of file. This works great when we stick to the rules but sometimes two jobs might use the same logo and instead of copying the logo to the second job the operator links to the logo in the first job. That’s not a problem until the first job is done and gets archived. Then instead of the 5 minutes spent to print the second job when it’s approved we spend an hour tracking down the logo – just exactly which job was the original file in?
The same applies with my photography. The rules are different but the goal is the same, know where my files are.
My life's work - impressive, no?
This is my file structure for my photography. I have a folder that is just for my photography. No excel files, no PDF files, just my photos. And the reason I don’t use the “Pictures” folder in my home folder is because iPhoto and iTunes throw stuff in there and they don’t play by my rules (holy crap! Am I anal or what?) At the top you can see I have an Extensis Portfolio catalog of my archived images. Those images are offline on hard drives – more on that in another post. There are some folders that have a different set of rules but they still have rules. My personal photography, professional portfolio and texture library don’t get archived, just backed up (there’s a difference? yes, that’s another post too). Those folders aren’t part of my “work” so they don’t go inside of the “Work In Progress” folder (the WIP). My current jobs are in the WIP and there’s a separate folder for each job. Inside that job folder there’s a job specific catalog and a folder of images for that job. All pictures for that job are in that images folder. This keeps all the elements of a job together in one place. I like this compartmentalized approach because it lets me move the job folder out of the WIP and onto an archive drive without having to round up all the pieces of the job.
If you look closely you’ll see I have a “To Archive” folder in there, that’s because I have a nice big drive to work from and I have the space to build up a 250 GB chunk of data before I run out of space. Then I buy a couple of 250 GB drive and archive my old jobs. If I didn’t have a giant working drive I’d buy the archive drives ahead of time and move old jobs off as I was done with them.
I know some people have derivative files of their RAW images. They export TIFFs or JPGs of all their images. I’m sure they have a good reason to do this, I don’t so I skip this step. It saves me time and drive space. If I did do this step I would have a separate folder for each image type within the job folder.
Folder Structure for Lightroom catalog with derivative files
This is to save me time when I need to archive a file, so I can grab the entire job folder and move it to another drive. Also, by being careful about where I put files it reduces the chance that I won’t be able to find a particular image when I need it.
If you need help with DAM, Lightroom or any cataloging or backup issues related to photography please contact me for a consulting session here.
Ok, so keep all the stuff that goes together in one spot and keep it away from the stuff that doesn’t go with it. Now let’s operate on some rockets!
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