This book was recommended by several people before I purchased it. I thought I had a good grip on my archiving and management system...I was wrong.


This book is a tad dated now but its principles are still standing strong.

I would recommend this to anyone who is making images.





Fashion Photographer David Paul Larson
[...]

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.

If you're an amateur or a professional getting into digital photography you need to sit down and read a book like this. Managing your photographs (your "assets") is necessary and it will help you find, print and publish your work.

This book isn't 100% up to date but the book's web site is a nice supplement with active discussions.

This is a must-have book for photographers who are amassing a large collection of photos.

I needed to read it 2 times before getting a feel for how to impliment it.

Great strategies and it has now changed my workflow completely and for the better

Money very well spent (although it cost me many thousands more since I also updated my computer, server, and softward to impliment this)

Regards, Dean

This is a good book. It is very helpful in determining how to organize photographs. It also is a give a good review of Bridge. It would be nice for the book to be up dated to cover CS3.

I found this book to be an excellent resource to help you to understand how all the pieces fit together.

As a novice in the area of digital asset management, I found this book to be extremely helpful.....well written and full of great suggestions on how best to manage your photos. Highly recommended.......a true five-star guide.

Helps you learn how to deal with all the digital photography photos that amass on your hard drive. Do you save them as JPEG , RAW, both? What about DNG? How do you tag, and archive these files? Why would I do it this way? It's important to know when your files reach into the thousands!! Do you want to lose your data or save it as an inferior file? I hope this book gets updated yearly.

The DAM Book was probably much needed when it was first published - its publication coincided with a realization by many professional and serious amateur photographers that handling the quickly growing digital photo collections required a sound organizing approach and dedicated software tools. The book aptly points out that dealing with digital image workflow and the resulting file archives is in many significant ways different than dealing with film-based archives. Based on this initial premise, the book offers recommendations on how to organize digital photo studio workflow and filing / archive system.

Alas, the author chose to tie VERY CLOSELY his mostly sensible conceptual framework (i.e., HOW to organize) with very specific software and hardware. Often, more general advice is difficult or impossible to separate from his step-by-step, software-specific recipes. So, unless you use exactly the same software and hardware configuration as the author, much, if not most of this information will be of little use.

Since the book was first published, new, DAM- and photographic workflow-oriented software has become available (Adobe CS3, including the new Bridge is now in public beta nearing its release; and Apple Aperture 1.5 and Adobe PS Ligtroom 1.0 are the new, more workflow-focused tools), and more up-to-date (although dispersed) discussion of problems in question can be found in numerous articles on the web. This makes large portions of the book obsolete, as new tools enable different workflows that may be better suited to many photographers' preferences.

The book has other issues.

First, the author LOVES using technical jargon. While technical vocabulary is appropriate in discussing technical issues, creating new terms and elaborate taxonomies for everything is an overkill. The author's misguided argument for using "controlled vocabularies" (a common term, which he uses in his own, very peculiar way - p. 47) is a good case in point. As Eric Abrahamson (Columbia Business School) aptly points out in his excellent book "A Perfect Mess," organizing is always good in principle, but OVER ORGANIZING by creating systems more complex than it is necessary to get the job done, comes at a very steep price in time and resources needed to maintain the system. Enough said.

Secondly, since this is a workflow book (not a coffee-table book), the full color print is totally unnecessary, and the price point is consequently too high. This should have been one of those $9.95 O'Reilly quick-guide booklets. Most photos reproduced in the book are simply decorative, or used as examples for things that are obvious (e.g. an example of a "group shot" - duh!; or a photo of wine barrels in a cellar as a metaphor for file storage system). Photos are not interesting on their own merit; screen captures and simple diagrams would be just as effective in greyscale.

In summary, you may want to flip through the pages of the book at a local library or bookstore - what's really useful and noteworthy here, can be easily grasped in less than 15 minutes; otherwise, your money may be better spent on a good book focused on the actual software tools YOU are committed to using.

The DAM Book was probably much needed when it was first published - its publication coincided with a realization by many professional and serious amateur photographers that handling the quickly growing digital photo collections required a sound organizing approach and dedicated software tools. The book aptly points out that dealing with digital image workflow and the resulting file archives is in many significant ways different than dealing with film-based archives. Based on this initial premise, the book offers recommendations on how to organize digital photo studio workflow and filing / archive system.

Alas, the author chose to tie VERY CLOSELY his mostly sensible conceptual framework (i.e., HOW to organize) with very specific software and hardware. Often, more general advice is difficult or impossible to separate from his step-by-step, software-specific recipes. So, unless you use exactly the same software and hardware configuration as the author, much, if not most of this information will be of little use.

Since the book was first published, new, DAM- and photographic workflow-oriented software has become available (Adobe CS3, including the new Bridge is now in public beta nearing its release; and Apple Aperture 1.5 and Adobe PS Ligtroom 1.0 are the new, more workflow-focused tools), and more up-to-date (although dispersed) discussion of problems in question can be found in numerous articles on the web. This makes large portions of the book obsolete, as new tools enable different workflows that may be better suited to many photographers' preferences.

The book has other issues.

First, the author LOVES using technical jargon. While technical vocabulary is appropriate in discussing technical issues, creating new terms and elaborate taxonomies for everything is an overkill. The author's misguided argument for using "controlled vocabularies" (a common term, which he uses in his own, very peculiar way - p. 47) is a good case in point. As Eric Abrahamson (Columbia Business School) aptly points out in his excellent book "A Perfect Mess," organizing is always good in principle, but OVER ORGANIZING by creating systems more complex than it is necessary to get the job done, comes at a very steep price in time and resources needed to maintain the system. Enough said.

Secondly, since this is a workflow book (not a coffee-table book), the full color print is totally unnecessary, and the price point is consequently too high. This should have been one of those $9.95 O'Reilly quick-guide booklets. Most photos reproduced in the book are simply decorative, or used as examples for things that are obvious (e.g. an example of a "group shot" - duh!; or a photo of wine barrels in a cellar as a metaphor for file storage system). Photos are not interesting on their own merit; screen captures and simple diagrams would be just as effective in greyscale.

In summary, you may want to flip through the pages of the book at a local library or bookstore - what's really useful and noteworthy here, can be easily grasped in less than 15 minutes; otherwise, your money may be better spent on a good book focused on the actual software tools YOU are committed to using.

I've been struggling with digital workflow, more storage and management than post-processing, for a long time. I take a lot of digital images, and so this is always an in-my-face problem. This book provided good ideas and a fully working example of a process that works. Is it perfect, meaning did I use the author's process w/o change? No. But his thinking gave me the solid foundation to finish developing my own ideas and actually put in place an effective storage and management workflow. Partly, the world is changing, with for instance the introduction of Adobe Lightroom since this was published. That product and Apple Aperture both fill the void somewhat differently than the Bridge/ACR/Photoshop/iView based workflow outlined in the DAM book. Also, since publication, iView has been purchased by Microsoft and the effects that will have are still unknown. But tools will always change. At least this book outlines what you need to consider else you get mired down and possibly worse, lose photos because you don't have adequate safeguards in your process.

Does Lightroom replace this workflow? No. The author doesn't think so, and neither do I. But I am using Lightroom for the initial import phase, and like it better than Bridge by a lot. Also, I don't use iView, as I was already using iMatch, which fills the same void, about as well as iView. iMatch is a little bit rougher around the edges, is MS Windows only, and probably a bit slower as a browser, but it has great functionality as a cataloging application. Just to point out, there are a few other tools that fill the same voids as those the author uses.

This book also fully covers the RAW image manipulation part of the workflow. I was more in tune with that part already, but still learned a lot from the book.

If you even remotely think you need this book, you do. You owe it to yourself to read it. And if you don't want to think about it, you can even today adopt the authors process completely and get up to speed quickly, and have an effective and efficient process within a few days (if you own the required products). That's probably the best way to use the book. Just do what he says. Then, as you use the workflow day to day, you'll find the areas you might want to change and you can do that. But in the meantime, you'll be adding value to your collection and spending a lot less time in the process while you're making those decisions.

I'm currently helping two professional photographers set up their digital archiving system, and we used this book as a base for our system. This is definitely a book for serious photographers, but it only touches the surface of creating a serious archiving system, mainly because the one system Krough describes is his own.

Setting up a digital archive is serious work, and while many of Krough's suggestions were helpful and a good source of information, we also found many problems in practice. For instance, we found his recommended cataloguing software, iView Media Pro, to be too unstable to trust with information that would take months or more to recover. There was also curiously a limit on the number of files the program could handle- for us it was around 20,000 images, whereas Krough claims to use the program for over 100,000 images a year.

If you're serious about DAM, this is a good primer, but it is only an example of one system, and should be read as such. We have spent months finding what works for us- some of which is techniques Krough describes in this book.

Good luck.

All the information in this book is great, but frankly none of it was any different from what I'm already doing. I have around 20K photos organized right now, didn't find any especially useful new information.

For someone who is starting out on organizing their photos, I could see this being a FANTASTIC resource. If you are already have a work flow that involves tools such as Downloader Pro, Photomechanic, IPTC tagging and Photoshop, skip it. If you don't, then BUY this book now.

Very compreshensive. From how to name and label photos as you import them to what type of disks to use for backups. He covers thousands of details that i would not have thought about. Is clearly geared toward professional level of photo indexing. However, he offers helpful suggestions for any level of digital photographer.

The viewpoint is specifically from one of a MAC user with iView and Photoshop CS2. He says his concepts apply to any software of this type. But, his examples are all with these packages. Great if you plan on using these packages, annoying if you are not.

Very well written and a bargain for all the information you get.

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.

Extremely usefull roadmap to navigating the new territory of digital workflow. If you are a professional photographer shooting digitally, this book is the essential guide to everything you need to capitalize on digital's opportunity and avoid time consuming mistakes. I feel like an evangelist, as I've bought a handfull of copies for colleagues.

One of the most difficult realities of managing thousands of digital photo images is how to label them in a consitent manner so that you can easily retrieve photos and keep track of photos that have been altered. Another important consideration is if you will be able to read the information as software and hardware changes occur. Peter Krogh makes logical suggestions and tells you why he chose to label an image in a particular manner. The DAM Book also has great suggestions on backing up photos. I have always struggled with labeling/numbering consistency, Peter Krogh makes it all very logical.

Any photographer who is serious about their craft needs to take a good look at The DAM Book. This book was written by a true professional that knows their stuff and will assist you in getting your photos from the the boxes and boxes scattered no doubt throughout your house and into the digital repository that is a better place to store, access, and retrieve the precious prints that you work so hard on producing.

From a discussion on how to get archived images into the computer to managing the vast amounts of data to learning the basics or how to clean up and make your pictures jump out at the person looking at them, this is an amazing guide that will make your money back in no time for the small price that you will pay.

For all photographers, this book needs to quickly become your desk companion... you won't know how you functioned before you had this wonderful text!!!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

"The DAM Book" is a seminal work on a topic of considerable importance to the serious digital photographer, and Krogh clearly knows what he's talking about and does an excellent job of explaining without going overboard. If you're at all interested in the question of how to file, archive, and index your digital photos, you should read this book.

Stylistically, though, "The DAM Book" is hampered by Krogh's almost toadying love for everything Adobe - in particular Adobe Bridge and Adobe DNG. His decision to center the book heavily around those two products along with iView Media Pro looks like a faux pas now, since iView is now owned by Microsoft and Adobe is planning to release LightRoom as their own DAM solution. I don't expect to see Bridge and iView being featured in the 2nd Edition of the book.

Still, Krogh does explain the basic concepts well enough that you can translate them to other products. He also explains the reasons behind his recommendations. And his explanations are surprisingly clear considering what an esoteric topic this is.

Highly recommended.

If you are browsing for this or similar books, that's a sign that you're facing reality: digital photography requires discipline. Discipline, you will get plenty of with Krogh's recipes. Up to you to decide if his file-and-retrieve system meets your exact needs, but surely it will give you food for thought. The 'system' is heavily biased towards using iView, the cataloguing software. Unless you decide to just go for it, you might end up being caught in no-man's land, using Adobe's Bridge more limited features until you figure out if Adobe's new Lightview or Apple's own Aperture could do iView's trick (they probably won't, if you follow Krogh's scriptures quite literally). Perhaps Peter should come up with an updated edition discussing the new options in some detail. All in all, buy the book. It will strengthen your resolve to put order in your picture folders, and do so in a way that will serve you well in the future too.

This is an important first book on DAM. It would have been helpful from the beginning to have a simple outline of the workflow steps, rather than illustrations of various phases throughout the book. Also, the work is too heavily dependent on Adobe and DNG. His arguments that DNG is the universal format of the future seem rather unsupported by facts and history. That said, this is a very well written book with enough universals to be highly recommended. It is a must read for the digital photographer.

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.

Even if like me, you're not shooting gigs of digital images a year, the Krogh book is a must read. I'm no longer a pro shooter but I do need a handle on effective archiving schemes for my images. Peter does an excellent job of explaining his system that allows users to archive, organize and FIND your images. Well though out system that makes sense. While I'm no longer a working Pro shooter, I still have associations with pro's I went to photo school with (years before digital) or folks I work with and I recommend they pick up this book and read it cover to cover.

I found this book to be a great help in standardizing my approach to storage, file naming, metadata, and backup, either by confirming what I'd already adopted or introducing new tools like 'Import from Camera' and iView Media Pro. I appreciated the sections on the advanced use of Bridge and RAW, and the advice on a rating system.

I've switched to MediaPro based on Peter's recommendation and find it a really wonderful tool that interacts nicely with CS2 and Bridge - much more friendly and robust than the competing products I've used (on PC). Catalog Sets are an awesome organization tool.

Thanks to Peter for writing the book. As another reviewer mentions, it's the right book at the right time. Time is always an issue for a part time photographer and these workflow recommendations have helped standardize and streamline my processes a great deal.

For any serious photographer with oceans of high-resolution images, Peter Krogh's "The DAM Book" could prove indispensible. His extraordinary attention to logic and detail are precisely what is needed to tame the avalanche of files with which many of us grapple. Given enough time and patience, lots of folks might be able to create an efficient and workable digital asset management workflow but Peter has done it and documented it. I'm already adopting the bulk of his suggestions. If you have thousands of important images strewn across a hodge-podge of storage media and whose retrieval depends largely on your memory, this book will be a tonic. Highly recommended.

A useful book, but as is often the case the authors Apple preference leads him to miss some major factors that mean PC's are a far better platform for Digital Asset Management.

Despite stating that a primary objective is to keep your files "Live and Local" (his mantra) he seems unaware that in a PC case you can easily have 12, 17 or 22+ hot swap hard drives in your workstation, running in an advanced Raid array - raid 5 or 6, which leads to large capacity multi Tb arrays, in excess of 200Mb/sec throughput, and hot swap easy access.

His 'ultimate system' is your (Mac) computer with an optical fibre networked Rack of raid array drives, (the x-raid solution) but at a ridiculous cost ($10,000 premium over what a PC workstation with same array would cost) His mid level answer is a seperate drive box (8+ drives) networked together via Ethernet to your main machine. which is slow and cumbersoma and still more $.

Photographers have the strange hardware requirements of mostly being individual machine users with extremely high storage needs, comparable to that of a large business. So their hardware requirements lead to configurations, such as a personal workstation with 12 + drives in it, which are easily fulfilled in the PC world, but completely alien to the Apple world, with its lack of serious custom build options. this major factor doesnt get a mention.

His preference for JBOD over Raid is also somewhat inexplicable, as a drive failure is data lost. Backup will restore it of course, but is will involve a lot more effort that plugging in another Raided drive. Individual drives are only good for backup/ deep archive. By far the most common data loss will be drive failure (hard drives are in two states: "failed" or "yet to fail") so prepare for that by using raid arrays for all information needed with redundant coverage (RAID). Deep storage indeed should be on individual drive backup copies, but thats another matter. Yet again it is more likely that the difficulty of having internal high level Raid in a Mac leads him to this short sighted advice.

the other chapters on organising your files and nomenclature are useful, assuming you are using Bridge/Camera Raw. If you use another set of programs, or are open minded enough to consider using a high end PC workstation (shock!), I'd find it hard to recommend this book.

I was deeply impressed by Krogh's book, I'm a professional landscape photographer and got quite a number of ideas for improving my own workflow and productivity from the book. The book is detailed, describes general principles starting from easy-to-follow examples, and is clear and complete. I put together a somewhat longer review of the book on PhotograBlog, but the conclusion is simple--it's an extremely useful book for professional and very serious amateurs, and I think it will provide signficant value to photographers across a wide range of levels of experience with DAM.

I bought this book in hopes it would provide cross-platform, cross-software, general guidance for Digital Asset Management. Alas, such was not the case.

Mr. Krogh's guidance is, unfortunately, limited to the co-ordination of Adobe's Photoshop CS2 Bridge (which has well-known bugs) with his preferred catalog software iView Media Pro. His file preference is DNG.

This book does not provide general guidance for a DAM system using your own preferred software - if you are not using Bridge and iView, skip it.

This book is very good I would reccomend it to anyone who has a lot of digital images or is planning on shooting a lot in the future. Mr. Krogh has laid out the book from begining to end with a step by step plan for keeping track of what for me was becoming a giant mess. Using the techniques that are outlined in the book I have been able to start getting a handle on a big pile of images and I now have a method for keeping track of them in the future.

I really liked the book, and not only for its content. It's one of the few advanced books I've ever read that explains a difficult subject in an interesting, enjoyable way while still respecting the reader's intelligence. And, I say that having tried to do the same thing myself (my own books are here on Amazon, too), but Krogh does it better.

I especially appreciated that he skipped all the boring introductory stuff that he was smart enough to know his readers already knew, and jumped right into the meat. In fact, the book is all meat.

Krogh's focus is on the busy pro who needs to work efficiently day-to-day and who also want to maximize the value of his or her stock photos. Krogh shoots more pictures in an hour than I do in a month, and nobody except my children's grandparents wants any of my "stock" photos, but I benefitted enourmously from his workflow nonetheless.

One of the many benefits of migrating from film photography to digital is the potential for taking many, many more images without incurring the expense of buying film. What that can mean is a filing nightmare. What "The DAM Book" provides is an efficient alternative to that nightmare. Presented in concise fashion, the book draws a road map for cataloguing, tagging and, most importantly, safeguarding digital files in a way that is sure to become an industry standard.

The DAM book really turned my thinking upside down in terms of my approach to digital assets management, files, structure and workflow. It is a great book, presented in a logical well written manner that captures and hold your attention as he shakes up your ingrained views and habits. It also serves as a terrific reference to return to, as you begin to implement his ideas and need to return for a booster shot on some aspect of the workflow. It is worth the investment in time and money.

This book is extreamly useful and a MUST for all photographers shooting digital RAW files. One of the few computer books that I simply could not stop reading.

For many photographers new to the not so new digital media this book is a must. The old and tried shoe box method just does not hold in a Hard Drive or external CD or DVD retrieval system. Of course if you only shoot a few files this is not an issue, but a few years from now it will be, and your favorite shots will be like a needle in a haystack. For pros it clears the mystery behind cataloging. It also helps in choosing what software is best for the task, a quite usual hurdle. "Thanks for writing the book" is a good way of putting it. Oh!, most of my collegues have already bought it,others will follow.

I found this book incredibly good. There are, however, a few things that could be improved. First is the fact that the sistem described is designed for a professional photographer, a person that earns his living through his photos, so the system is a bit too much if that is not your case. However the author leves plenty of room to customize his settings to fit your needs, which is good.

The picture with his server machine in a wooden box with controled temperature and humidty is just too much! Maybe Peter Krogh could have divided the book in three different parts, one for the ocasional shooter, one for the advanced amateur and the last aimed for the pros. Tha way the book would be much easier to read and understand of course.

The diagrams could also be improved, I found them not too clarifiyng.
Then there are some problems due to the fact that some time has passed since he wrote the book and new applications have been released. For example the new iView version can read the metadata writen in Bridge in the XML format, so there is no reason now to duplicate the star system used in Bridge, but that is not Peter's fault of course, and I suppose those things could be corrected in the web site.

All in all is an almost perfect book, 98% recomended.

This book is meant for the Professional photographer who owes it to their clients to deliver, organize and archive digital files.

If overkill to you is being able to find and access all of your digital files, then continue being the amatuer that you are.

Peter Krogh "wrote the book" on Digital Asset Management.

The book is great, and covers many issues everyone needs to know about. However, unless you are a well paid professional photographer many of organizational and backup tools will not apply to you.

For example, while shooting on the field, he recommend backing up two external devices and a laptop. At home, he suggests creating dvd archives (two sets), having RAID, JBOD or another type of failsafe, along with a NAS server setup and perhaps backing up a few more copies away from your house / work. Quite excessive, even for the serious photographer.

But if you can look past that, there are some brilliant, lasting organizational techinques that require skill and practice, and will serve you well.

Krough has written a book that deals with a need that many photographers have ignored as they have made the transition from film to digital. How do you keep track of all those thousands of files?

The most important contributions of this book are it's clear explanation of the big picture of the cataloging process. He suggests developing a systematic way to name, store, and archive each file.

He answers important questions such as: How does Browsing software (like Bridge) differ from cataloging software (like iView MediaPro). Where in the work flow should metadata be added. Why convert all your RAW files to DNG? What are all those confusing IPTC panels used for?

I suspect he suffers from an Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. Instead of being satisfied with a 5-star rating system, he pulls in color labels to pull out the nuances of images that are in some way flawed. This is simply overkill for those of us that need to be out taking pictures. If one fully embraced his meticulous file management practices, there would be no time to shoot pictures.

His naming system is baffling to me. He proposes naming all of the files with names like: "Krough_010501-1234.dng". Personally for me using some descriptive language that others may be able to understand is useful, so my naming convention would be: "Tiger "Swallowtail_1234.dng"

Hardware for storage is discussed at some length and is quite helpful. I do disagree with his statement that " buying expensive RAID setups for archive files doesn't make sense for most photographers." In the past I used his proposed method of multiple external hard drives, but two years ago, after I had two LaCie hard drives fail, I made the jump to Apple's Xserve RAID. Now my data is fully backed up at all times. It has performed flawlessly and does not have to be much more expensive than multiple hard drives.

He is enamored of using Scripts with Bridge. Most users (including me) find Scrips confusing and simply ignore them. However, his descriptions are clear and I'm tempted to try them.

Despite the negative comments I do recommend this book. Nowhere else have I seen these topics covered in such detail. For Professional or serious amateur photographers, keeping track of your files is a growing problem. This book shows you how to structure your images so that in the future you can find that needle in the haystack.

This is a daunting task to even think about and I can't having the finicky details of reliable archiving laid out in such a clear and concise way is pretty important for those of us that know how unreliable the digital realm of data can be. This is a great book for anyone needing a long term strategy for archiving and managing a lot of photos and it provides a number of methods and strategies for ensuring your photos survival. It's no small task but thankfully it's made easier with this book. Hopefully the coming versions of this book will mention metdata embedding and search strategies with Spotlight/OS X Tiger which is a huge productivity boost for those not wanting to open iView catalogs every time they want to find an image by keyword. Still, this will be on my shelf for years to come.

Whether you are obsessional or haphazard, a novice or a pro photographer depending on photgraphy for your living, "The DAM book" by Peter Krogh is a must.

Unlike physical records of pictures in film, one can't simply open a book of transparencies or negatives, flip through and see that everything is fine.

The filing systems, be it shoe box or filing system like a doctors or lawyers office is either burnt gone or its intact.

Digital photographs, by contrast can get corrupted, the drives WILL always fail eventually and your precious images are lost forever.

There are no drives, optical disks or tapes that are truly archival. Drives with warranties are pretty useless except to let you know when your drive should be dumped and everything transferred to a newer model.

Drives that fail are simply replaced with another drive (often rebuilt from someone elses returned failures) but your data isn't recovered. That takes specialized data recovery software which may or may not recover all your files. some recovered fiels may not open properly!

So where is the cavalry to rescue you?

Here comes this special book by Peter.

This book provides a sytematic foolproof methodology for filing, retrieving and backing up all your thousands of images. His systems gave me a path to follow after I lost a 400GB Lacie drive and had the choices of saying goodbye to all my files, paying $2000-4000 for a drive recovery service or trying myself.

I had to devote about 40 hours to get my pictures back. Except a number of files are corrupted. Thought that I had backup copies. Well of some but not all.

Then a backup drive also failed and i made a mistake at 3 am on a temporary storage drive used to create space for recovery.

Here's my advice.

1. Read the DAM book first.

2. Buy Iview Media Pro to Organize your files

3. Have drives in pairs so you can follow Peters instructions to safe file management.

4. If possible use drives the are S.M.A.R.T. enabled. These are monitored for signs of failure and there is software to sned you an email if the drive is failing. That warning arrives in time for you to safely transfer your files to a new drive!

5. Drives in your computer are usually SMART capable. External firewire drives belong in a case by Granite Digital or use SATA drives in cases from MacSales.com.

Now read the Dam book again.

The book has much more than securing and accessing your pictures, but this is all I care about. This is a 5 star book

This book is absolutely terrific! This is the first really useful book that answers the question, "Now that I have thousands of digital photos in my computer, how can I keep track of them and make sure they will be available for future generations?"

Peter's writing is crystal clear, and the illustrations in the book are wxtremely helpful. In addition, Peter's website and DAM Forum provide help if you need it.

The concepts and techniques in this book are aimed at professional and advanced amateur photographers, and the book presumes that the reader has experience with digital cameras and advanced image processing software.

This book has been a tremendous help to me, and I highly recommend it.

Some books are different - they make you understand concepts through experiences, rather than theory. This book is one of them, although the first chapter is a little dry. Read through the first chapter, and you won't want to keep the book down for the rest of the book. Although the book is written from a professional photographer's point of view, it has tons of ideas and "organization-tips" for every person who uses a digital camera and wants to better arrange their collection.

And yes, the book is certainly specific to Adobe Bridge, and IView Media Pro - and the author does assume that everyone uses Apple OS X, but only 5% of the book is specific to users of these programs and OS - even if you don't use these applications, you'll benefit from the book. You'll learn how to develop your photo-rating system. Peter Krogh even attempts to make the entire system future proof with a look at how many photographs you might have 10 years from today. He discusses Adobe's DNG format in detail, and provides significant info about metadata. All put together, this is "the book" to buy if you are even remotely interested in DAM.

Geetesh Bajaj/Indezine.com

Some books are different - they make you understand concepts through experiences, rather than theory. This book is one of them, although the first chapter is a little dry. Read through the first chapter, and you won't want to keep the book down for the rest of the book. Although the book is written from a professional photographer's point of view, it has tons of ideas and "organization-tips" for every person who uses a digital camera and wants to better arrange their collection.

And yes, the book is certainly specific to Adobe Bridge, and IView Media Pro - and the author does assume that everyone uses Apple OS X, but only 5% of the book is specific to users of these programs and OS - even if you don't use these applications, you'll benefit from the book. You'll learn how to develop your photo-rating system. Peter Krogh even attempts to make the entire system future proof with a look at how many photographs you might have 10 years from today. He discusses Adobe's DNG format in detail, and provides significant info about metadata. All put together, this is "the book" to buy if you are even remotely interested in DAM.

"Workflow" is the popular buzzword when it comes to digital photography, and no wonder: workflow is critical! We all need help controlling our ever-growing digital photo collection. Peter Krogh is also an active commercial photographer and that's a big factor in this book's success. Armed with real-world experience, he shares his tips and tricks for processing, organizing, keywording, and protecting your images in an efficient way.

Krogh's system combines Photoshop CS2's Bridge with separate cataloging software (he uses IView Media Pro, but points out that Extensis Portfolio and others work just fine too). He also makes a persuasive case for using Adobe's DNG format in your Raw file workflow - i.e., for archiving your images.

The DAM Book covers everything - from setting up to backing up. But the best "advertisement" for Krogh's system? He uses these techniques to maintain his own digital file - one that grew by more than 135,000 images in the past three years alone!

Casually flipping through the pages, you can tell this book is targeted at the professional / commercial digital photographer who deals with a high volume of highly valuable images. But don't let that deter you from taking a deeper look. Any amateur digital photographer who is serious about keeping their images well organized and preserved will derive great benefit from this book.

Still, the author states several assumptions about the reader. They are; that the reader is using professional-level image editing software such as Photoshop CS2, is going to be using DAM software such as iView Media Pro, is willing to invest in the hardware to run the software, and lastly is willing to invest in the digital storage space needed to manage a large image collection. In other words, this book will not be very useful for casual photographers who manage their image collection with iPhoto. That is unless you are looking to graduate from iPhoto and establish a more advanced digital image management system.

The DAM Book presents a fully developed and systematic approach to integrating digital asset management practices into an efficient workflow. A high value is placed on good organization, expandability and future compatibility. The book stresses extensive use of metadata, file & folder naming conventions, and methods for image versioning. No longer will you be wondering which image is the original, which was modified, which copy is a work in progress, and which images are the final products.

There's a thoroughly detailed road map to follow here. That alone would be great for people who are simply looking for a template of steps to follow. But the real value is in the author's discussion of the reasoning behind the methods and procedures he's developed. This is immensely helpful when it comes to implementing the concepts presented into your own workflow.

Three chapters are dedicated to the software used in DAM. Two chapters discuss setting up and using Adobe Bridge for pre-Photoshop editing. Another chapter covers image cataloging software. That's all great, but what about "converting" an existing, albeit disorganized digital image storage structure produced from years of inconsistent workflow methods?

Hooray for the last chapter! Even though the author can't possibly know what your image management system is, if any, there's plenty of help here to "start over" almost painlessly. Even if you are in the process of digitizing slides or prints with a scanner!

Thank you, thank you, thank you Peter Krogh.

One need not be a professional photographer to benefit from this superb book. If you can relate to my background, I think you will want to buy this book today.

I am just completing my 80th year. I love history. I believe I was ten years old when I got my first camera. I have scans of the first pictures I took. I've been scanning old negatives and pictures for several years. I have my mother's scrapbook which has pictures back to 1882. I scanned a negative of my mother swimming in 1915. I made a DVD movie of her wonderful scrapbook. I think of myself as the family historian. I want to see all these pictures on a computer in a large image and share them with my family (lots of people on different platforms)-and I want them for posterity. I have used a digital camera for 5 years. I am currently using a Nikon D70 and shooting RAW most of the time.

But I haven't been able to figure out how to catalog my images. I have used iViewMediaPro but not well. Though iView has an excellent manual, the relationship between Bridge and iView has baffled me. This book has brought it together for me. I finally understand the difference between a browser and a catalog and where they do and do not come together.

The hardware information is invaluable. I now know how to buy the new drive I need. The reasoning about NEFs (Nikon's RAW files) makes sense to me and obviously applies to the RAW files of other digital cameras.

His naming system makes sense. And it surely is better than mine has been.

I'm wallpaper cheap (tight as the paper on the wall). Buy this book.

If you are a professional photographer awash in thousands of digital images or a serious amatuer, hoping to build a searchable library of photographs, this book will become your manual for organization. The area of cataloging digital photography is quite new and the software needed for the task is changing at a rate difficult to keep up with.

Krogh has created the bible of digital image organization. The book is full of tips on how to get started for any size collection. His sense of humor makes this coma inducing topic enjoyable to sort out.

With an eye to your ability to expand, knowing that the current software might become obsolete in coming years Krogh seems to cover all the bases.

So, if you find yourself wondering where the great photos you made on assignment in Alaska last year are or simply hoping to find the baby photos this is a must read.

This is the book I have been looking for. I am a professional photographer with thousands of digital images. I have spent countless hours trying to find a system to archive, back-up, and find images when needed. The DAM Book has provided a clear and comprehensive system that answers my growing problem.

All photographers (and my clients) should own this book. I would recommend the DAM Book to all my collegues. A HUGE thanks to the author.

I have read the DAM book and I found it a very good resource for every serious photographer. The many tips and considerations in the book are useful for every day practice and it is great that the author bundled them in his DAM book so we can now all benefit from them; me as an amateur photographer included.

The book uses iView in its examples which is a product I don't use myself. Nevertheless it is easy to match the procedures as outlined in the book to idImager's feature set.

I had been waiting for a book like this for at least two years. Essentially, this book outlines in depth and in one place image workflow strategies from dowload to backup to tagging to cataloging. What this book does is bring together many aspects of image workflow that, until this book, were covered in bits and pieces from many different sources. If you are trying to develop a workflow to effectively manage hundreds or thousands of incoming images in an efficient manner, this book will help you get there. The author is a professional photographer who clearly has spent innumerable hours figuring out to efficiently process images- everything from detailed backup strategies, strategies to apply metadata, pros and cons of DNG, best practices in working with DNG files, and cataloging. If your livelihood depends on processing and keeping safe your images or you just want to preserve a collection of family photos, this should be a must read.

Weaknesses? The author does focus his DAM examples around iView Media Pro- which, while a very capable program (perhaps even the most capable DAM dekstop program), might seem to limit the books applicability to those who use iView. However, the author does a good job of describing concepts in general terms that would apply to other DAM applications. In addition, a good portion of the book focuses on how to effectively utilize Adobe Bridge, which perhaps would appeal to a much larger audience (and is worth the cost of the book in my view). Bottom line is that I feel significantly more comfortable with my backup and RAW image procesing workflow after having read this book. Also, this book makes a good complement to Bruce Fraser's Real World Camera Raw. The author has set up a dedicated web site and was was very responsive to questions I had after reading the book.