Managing inventory of printed photographs in different sizes

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swteven

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I want to use a LR catalog to manage an inventory of printed photographs that I have in stock. These printed photographs are stored in a physical flat file. It would be useful to be able to reference which printed sizes of a particular photo that I have available at a given time. I would like to use my existing LR catalog but this may be a case for having separate catalog for this purpose.

I am thinking about doing this with keywords. In this case a keyword would be a number that defines the shorter side of printed photograph (ie. a 16x20 inch print would be tagged with the number 16 as a keyword). By searching the catalog for the keyword 16, I could find all my printed photographs that are 16x20 inches in size.

Has anyone tried to do this? Any feedback is welcome - Thanks!
 
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Hi, I am not sure that Lightroom is primarily designed for the task envisaged.
While it is possible to keyword an image to denote that it has been printed at a particular size, or sizes, there is no real way for Lightroom to track your inventory per se.
Using a separate catalog will not solve the issue either.

My overwhelming thought is that an Excel spreadsheet, or something similar is just better for this kind of thing.
Let us know whether there is more to this than currently explained.

Tony Jay
 
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Tony - Thanks for your reply! I use Lightroom for my other image management functions. I know that Lightroom is not really designed for this particular task but it does have some database functionality that I could use, it gives me a visual for the photos and it shows the image filename. I have tried using Excel and other tools and they don't have a good way to show the image. Maybe I have not explored all the Excel options available but I would like to try LR for this.

The main thing I would like LR to do is to describe the shorter dimension of the printed photograph with a keyword (or another searchable field) as I described in my first post. The other thing would be to show whether the printed photograph was color or black & white (maybe a virtual copy would work for this).

It might also be useful to know whether I have multiple printed photographs in a given size but that is not essential.
 
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How many different photos are we talking about? How many different sizes for each photo?
I assume they will all have different prices.

I tend to side with Tony. Excel can be used to set up a fairly good flat file data base that can give you a lot more information than LR can, such as income per photo, income per size, income over a date range, inventory over a date range, etc.
 
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I only have about 100 printed photographs in stock. Going forward I will probably create most printed photographs on demand when a print is ordered. Price is not too important to me right now for any kind of tagged feature.
 
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Would there be any issues to consider by using numbers as keywords?

(This could be the start of a different post…)
 
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swteven said:
Would there be any issues to consider by using numbers as keywords?

(This could be the start of a different post…)
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None that I have encountered. I use them when I print something, eg, 4x6, 5x7 , 8x10, etc

I should note that I don't print locally, I send jpegs to pro printers. These keywords go on the jpegs.
 
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