Digital Asset Management (DAM) with ACDSee Pro

Digital asset management, or DAM, is the process of downloading, naming, rating, grouping, tagging, processing, archiving, searching, tracking, and otherwise organizing files. In particular, for the purposes of this article, I am referring to the management of digital photographs, and ACDSee Pro is a great tool that can help you do everything on this list. But merely having a great tool is not enough – you also need a strategy for using that tool. That is my purpose in writing this article – to show you how to use ACDSee Pro in an effective manner. And by this, I mean, in a way that allows you to easily do any processing you need to do on your images, to easily group and tag your files in a way that makes them easy to find and access later, and perhaps most importantly, to easily backup all your images. You want your images to be readily accessible and organized in a way that will allow you or others (such as your family or potential customers) to find images of interest years and perhaps even decades from now. At least, that is the assumption behind DAM.

Perhaps the best known and most authoritative work on DAM is The DAM Book, by Peter Krogh. Most of my own understanding of the topic comes from that book and from discussions on the forum of his web site. In The DAM Book, Krogh describes a method of organization and of working that can help photographers – particularly professionals – manage their ever-increasing collection of digital images. I think he does a fantastic job of explaining how much there is to be gained by employing good DAM practices, and many readers become quite excited about doing so. The book assumes that the reader will already own Photoshop (CS2 or later) and will use that for browsing files, image editing, and most importantly, for processing RAW images (it should also be mentioned that Krogh assumes you are shooting RAW). But while that Photoshop has many features, it does not have any sort of cataloging facility, and Krogh argues emphatically that photographers need an additional cataloging application to help them manage their images. He does not recommend any one specific cataloging application, although he does describe the set of features a cataloging application needs in order to function in the workflow he advocates. Much of what Krogh writes about, then, deals with the process of using a Photoshop in conjunction with a separate cataloging application, using RAW image files in the DNG format as a means of coordinating information between the two applications.

ACDSee Pro can in fact be used in the manner described by Krogh, in which Photoshop is used for RAW processing, image editing, and some other tasks, but ACDSee Pro is used for cataloging. I encourage anyone interested in using ACDSee in conjunction with Photoshop in this fashion doing to read The DAM Book and see for themselves how this could be made to work.

However, the real power of ACDSee Pro is that it can actually accomplish almost everything that one might otherwise need Photoshop for. It is true that the editing features of ACDSee Pro are not quite as sophisticated as those of Photoshop, so some users may find they still need Photoshop for some editing tasks. But of course, ACDSee Pro supports the use of external editors, so that option is still available for those who want it.

So, what I am going to describe is an adaptation of the workflow endorsed by Krogh that is optimized to work well with ACDSee Pro on its own. If you sometimes need to use an external editor like Photoshop (or a free alternative, like the GIMP), that is fine too, but the workflow I will describe does not depend on having access to Photoshop. You will be working within ACDSee Pro exclusively unless you choose to use an external editor for some reason.

Like Krogh, I am also going to start by assuming that most of you are (or could be) shooting RAW. I know many people are reluctant to do this, because they do not understand how to use RAW, or fear that it will be more difficult. But once you see how easy ACDSee Pro and the DAM workflow can make the process of working with RAW images – easier, in fact, than working with JPEG in many respects – you may change your mind. Of course, I recognize that not everyone owns a camera capable of shooting RAW, so I will also describe how to take advantage of DAM ideas while still shooting JPEG.

I will warn you in advance this is a rather long essay, and the ideas I present may take a while to fully absorb and accept. However, I do feel you will find this process worthwhile. And in any event, I am trying to make it easier than actually reading The DAM Book in its entirely and then figuring out for yourself how to make it work with ACDSee Pro. The rest of the article follows in the next four entries.