BACK TO INDEX OF PHOTOSHOP TIPSWith thousands of images floating around on your hard drives there is a strong temptation to invest in expensive 3rd party "image management" software just to get a handle on filing, categorizing or even just finding images. It happens that WITHIN Photoshop is a powerful searchable relational database tool that is nicely low-tech and requires little planning. Categories simply evolve as needed and images are all at your fingertips without a great deal of thought or organizational skill. It works by using MetaData ( the data and information that is attached and part of each image file, including camera setting stats, optional editing history, dates, file sizes and format, etc. The editable section that we can use for our relational database is the IPTC (Int'l Press Telecommunications Council) section. There are 4 editable fields( actually, there are more, but these are the default settings) - description, keyword, author and copyright. My approach to this is to use a method that requires the least amount of thought - I only use the description field. Every image I know can exist simultaneously in multiple categories but it would be very laborious and memory intensive to store a copy or alias of a file in many different folders - and deciding WHICH folders and organizing the folders would simply be overwheming.
Suppose you have a picture that is a "exhibition quality black and white portrait, taken at dusk, scanned from grainy Tm3200 film, of a dog named Satan owned by Hortense, at night with the Milky Way visible in the background and a kid in a Godzilla Halloween costume". Simply type those very words into the description field. Done. The image is now categorized by 16 or so key words (all of the important words in the statement)
The image will pop up in the browser when you do a "search by description" for ANY of those words. If, for example, you have a need for grainy Halloween shots, this image will appear along with all other images that contain those words within their metadata. This is even less laborious when you realize that you can "batch" metadata - meaning that you can add descriptions or the other IPTC information to multiple files at once! This is especially important when you have hundreds of images of the same location or subject.
Here's how: IPTC fields are accessed in 2 ways 1. With the image selected in the File browser, all of the metadata is displayed at the bottom left of the browser, if you click on the Metadata tab. 2. If the image is already OPEN, the information can be found by going to File/File Info from the top menu. (If you wish to enter keywords, which are also searchable, you must access IPTC using this method) In the BROWSER: double click the description box( or click the pencil to the left of the word "description") to activate it, enter in your description filled with every word you might ever want to search for, then click the check-mark on the bottom border of the File Browser to apply the metadata to the image. In the FILE INFO dialog box: double click the box to the right of the word "description" to activate, type the info and click OK. Save the image.
SEARCHING BY KEYWORD OR DESCRIPTION
In the File Browser window- choose File/Search ( in CS2 browser, a.k.a. "Bridge", choose Edit/Find or Command-F) to access the dialog box. For Criteria select "description" "contains" or "keyword" "contains" depending on where you have attached the metadata. You will probably want to check the "Look in Subfolders" box. The images that contain the search criteria will pop up in the right of the browser window. You now have a powerful searchable relational image database, unless of course all your images are stored on CD's in a box somewhere. They must be on a hard drive for this to work!
ADDITIONAL TIPS 1. With an image open, you can instantly access the IPTC palette with the shortcut Option-Command-i (mac).
2. To batch process an entry, select all of the thumbnails you wish to append in the browser window, using SHIFT-CLICK or Command A to select the entire folder, then double click to make the entry in the IPTC window. I may take some time to append a large number of files but the memory allocation for this is negligible.
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