Lightroom as DAM (Digital Assets Management) program

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Long John Silver

Long John Silver

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Hi all,

Digging in the forums I see that this topic has been discussed superficially many times.

I recently discovered MS Expression Media and it's a nice environment but I use and I like LR so I think would be nice see the library module enanched to catalog other kind of documents.
Am I the only one with these needs?

While 8'% of my assets are just plain photos, recently I started adding to my catalog photos of digitized docs.
Once, when doing historical researches, was common to photocopy documents found in libraries and museums. Now it's fairly common to take shoots with digital cameras... Once at home I have to organize all my photos/documents for later retrieval.
Last week I started using LR and it's powerful keywording capabilities to organize my documents. It tooks a day just thinking how to add and organize new keywords without screwing up my current hierarchy. Still now I'm not sure I made the correct decision but... this is another story ;)

Now the problem is that for a given research or topic I haven't just photos but MS Office files, PDF and e-mails.

For e-mails there's no problem: I use google mail and the labels feature it's enough but for my other docs it's a nightmare. Would be nice managing everything inside LR.

Imagine I'm collecting documents for writing an article on the famous wreck of SS Edmund Fitzgerald...
I would have:

# Photos of the wrecks
# Photos of Lake Superior
# Photos of suriviving family members
# Videos of the wrecks
# Historical docs as images, MS Office files and PDF
# my article and other stuffs as MS Word docs.

Everything could be managed inside LR.

BTW my biggest concern about LR roadmap is that this wonderful product will be cluttered with too many features: IMHO lightness and speed are key factors in this application.

I imagine that the library module would be able to catalog and creates preview of Office files, video and PDF. I think that Adobe should have these technologies on the shelf.
The library module should be splitted in two: a "plain" version like the current one and an "extended" version with enhanced capabilities: a user could choose to load the plain or extended version based on his needs.

Am I dreaming or what? :eek:
Please give me your thoughts
 
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Maybe you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one....

I've always wanted LR to be able to catalogue all asset types, so that it's a catalogue for photographers and whatever files are part of their workflow - not just for camera-generated files. I know photographers for whom music and InDesign files are integral to their photographic workflow, or others who keep sales documentation in Word documents, and my writing projects include photos and many other file formats etc. Bridge is only a souped-up Finder/Explorer, and not an acceptable substitute for a DAM catalogue, and running two DAM programs side by side is not efficient.

Perhaps the way forward was shown by Jeffrey Friedl's LR2 plugin for video. IIRC it temporarily renamed the video file, copied a thumbnail or other JPEG to the video's original filename, imported it into LR, and then swapped back the file names. So it was fooling LR into importing files. You never know, some other plug-in author may experiment with this idea....

John
 
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[quote author=johnbeardy link=topic=8533.msg57675#msg57675 date=1259666393]
Maybe you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one....
[/quote]

But hope die the last :icon_twisted:

Bridge is only a souped-up Finder/Explorer, and not an acceptable substitute for a DAM catalogue, and running two DAM programs side by side is not efficient.
Click to expand...

I tried Portfolio an Expression but it's a nightmare and with thousand of files you soon finish to duplicate and messing up everything

Perhaps the way forward was shown by Jeffrey Friedl's LR2 plugin for video. IIRC it temporarily renamed the video file, copied a thumbnail or other JPEG to the video's original filename, imported it into LR, and then swapped back the file names. So it was fooling LR into importing files. You never know, some other plug-in author may experiment with this idea....
Click to expand...

Bridge it's an example for files preview. PDF files are invented by them and they are able to view and interface most of Office files. Premiere or Elements it's able to correctly view most of video files.
Wouldn't be rocket science to read ID3 tags from an MP3 file.

I see that Adobe has the technology to create preview of many file format on the shelf.

Once a file has it's preview and it's inserted in the LR catalog I would like to access to the keyword engine and I think this would be very easy.
From here... Yes I know that many would like to integrate editing capabilities but I could stick to just launch the associated external program when I want ot edit/modify the file. I could just have a configuration panel to change the default associated program for a given extension/type.

Just my 2c.

PS
I already sent a feature request for this to Adobe.
 
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Sure, they could do it if they wanted to. Those who manage very limited file types would cry 'bloat", while those with a wider vision of Lightroom would complain about the arbitrary list of file types. Internally, Adobe's LR team would have to negotiate such an expansion of the program's capabilities, and that sort of thing doesn't happen quickly. Also consider that Adobe have had the chance to get into DAM cataloguing before - apart from having been one of the initial investors in Extensis, more recently they could have chosen to morph Bridge into a catalogue.

That's why I think fooling LR with a plug-in is the more likely way for this to go. My Open Directly plug-in already allows you to launch the associated program, and one way I might develop it is to make LR catalogue whatever I want. "In bocca al lupo" for your feature request though.

John
 
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I've feature requested this ever since LR appeared and the response is always the same. LR is for photography. Despite it falling quite short for that purpose on the cataloguing side.
Which is a really shortsighted approach and damns LR to always being rather crippled in my view. For as a working photographer I need to catalogue all my working assets to do with a shoot and as LR cannot handle text notes, video files or sound or music, it is severely lacking. LR could be a really amazing programme if it were to open up it's catalogue to all files. If I want to do a slide show of images and use ambient sound, dialogue or even video along with my stills, a common photojournalist practice these days, LR doesn't let me file and keyword these files together, let alone recognize the files which are not stills and only certain limited image files at that.
The new version of Aperture seems quite interesting and for once way in advance of LR.
Just as PS became an unwieldy and less relevant tool for many photographers with the advent of digital imagery and large no.s of image to process. LR is liable to end up being left behind unless Adobe move LR forward along the DAM path.
 
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Photographers don't just have photographs....
 
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MarkNicholas said:
I'm with keeping it as it is for photographers. I also think they have gone too far by allowing video !!
Click to expand...
As a photographer I often want to associate other kinds of files with a single photo or more often with a specific shoot. For example, I recently read a book about landscape photography where the author had described how he got to the place where he made the image, what considerations he made with regard to light and tripod placement and lens choice. This would be a text file (or word doc) that I would very much like to have access to when I go to that gallery in Lightroom. Along the same lines, one of the subject areas I shoot is events of various kinds, things like Earth Day or a concert. What I've been doing is taking a picture of the program or flyer and including it with my shoot even though sometimes what I have to do is print out a web page or pdf file and take a picture of it. Much better would be to simply import that file, saves trees.
 
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One of the sidecar file types is the XMP file. An XMP file is a special type of XML file. I have not looked too deeply into the XMP specification, but it would appear that the XMP sidecar file is an ideal container for the information that you want to track. However tracking this information contained in a sidecar file from within LR might be impossible.
There are several plugins to LR that extend the functionality of the LR database tables. It is possible that one of these might be useful for your requirements. One that comes to minds is John Beardsworth's "Big Note" http://www.beardsworth.co.uk/lightroom/big-note/ This will certainly permit you to place large amounts of textural information directly into the database associated with the image. I haven't worked with the fields yet, but John also has a Search and replace Plugin that adds several custom fields it appears these could be used for specific information/URLs that you might want associated with images..

If you want to capture HTML information to include, taking photos of the webpage is probably the least effective. If a JPEG photo is what you want, Windows 7 comes with the Snipping tool (C:\WINDOWS\System32\SnippingTool.exe) it permits you to clip out a portion of your screen and save it as a JPEG. However Cutting and Pasting the formated text portion of the HTML or PDF page is probably more efficient in capturing the information content of the page ( This could be embedded as suggested using John's Big Note or These files managed outside of LR with pointers to these locations embedded inside the metadata or in a Big Note field.
 
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Clee01,

Thanks so much for pointing me to the snippingtool! That's a great little helper for all kinds of things. Certainly easier than using file/save as to stash a current version of a webpage.

In my day job I wrote a lot of XML code and am very familiar with this family of file types. XMP is a very specific version of a GML (General Markup Language) file, and the specs for what is allowed in the adobe flavor is given in the first couple of lines, one to the general rdf definition at http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#, and the other to a reference at adobe (which you can't get to). But the sidecar files are designed to go alongside a particular image and while having a big note in there is useful, I also am looking for a way to store notes relating to the whole gallery/shoot. For example, a couple of my cameras allow recording voice notes, a feature I've not explored mainly because I don't have a way to drop an audio file in a gallery and have it easy to get to.

I am looking for a more generalized file inclusion mechanism at the gallery level. Last month I assembled about 100 images into a gallery where I optimized them for printing to take to a show. In conjunction with that I prepared a spreadsheet that had the names of the images, captions, thumbnails, print sizes, prices and such. I stored it in the folder, but Lightroom doesn't know it's there.

I will certainly look into John's big-note, as that is something I also would like to have for individual images. And I'll try out the Any file plug in.

I find as I do more and more photography, I'm also wanting to record more and more information about how I set up things for a shoot as well as for individual shots. I find myself going back to the same location at different times of the year, or at the same time next year, and I would very much like to be able to review notes about that location from previous shoots in the same location. The other evening I imported a shoot of a few dozen frames that I'd taken at a park from more or less the same location I'd used a year earlier. As soon as I started looking at them in full screen, I remembered what I'd thought about them the last time, and I'd made the same mistake this time. I had the sun in the wrong place -- I remembered only after I was looking at the new shots that after the previous attempt I told myself I needed to be about 50 feet further to the right -- but I didn't have an easy way to make a note about the folder.

I guess where I'm going is that I feel Lightroom really needs more features at folder level. Not only notes, but things like being able to color code a folder so I know I've taken that folder to a certain level in my workflow, for example. Or being able to assign a star rating to the folder as a whole, or keywords to a folder separate from the keywords assigned to individual images in it. Having a right click on a folder give me a display that shows some folder level stats such as numbers of images at each rating level, each color coding, how many rejected, how many with no keywords, no captions, no titles, etc.
 
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