Graf Photography - Order or Chaos?

One of the very basic things you need to decide if you are just starting out is how you want to organize your image library. You need to have a numbering system that will enable you to locate individual shots out of thousands. How do you want to store your slides, in 20 page sheets or boxes, binders or a file cabinet? Do you want to file by subject, date, or locale? There is probably no single "best" way - but you should be very sure of how you want to do it before you start and then stick with it. Going back and renumbering or refiling thousands of slides is a monumental effort. A very good text reference for this is John Shaw's "Business of Nature Photography."

Here is our basic system, we prefer to file by subject;

1) Slides are coded with a two letter file code + a number, for example; BI-4567. This means to us that this slide belongs under the subject file "BIrds" and is number 4567 in our portfolio.

2) This ID and relevant image data are stored in a database created in Microsoft Access.

3) MS Access is used to create queries when it comes time to print labels - these queries are imported into MS Word for printing.

4) Slides are stored in archival pages in hanging file folders. There is a cross-reference created between the specific slide page and the unique image ID.

5) Any slides that are scanned are placed on a CD, and then cross-referenced back to the image ID.

The whole point of using a computer database is to be able to cross-reference your work, and to be able to find specific images on demand. There are many commercially available image management programs. This is the basic function of all of them.

Access has many advantages in creative freedom to organize it however you want, with whatever data you want. It can also export this data into other programs if you need to in the future. However, the downside is it can be a difficult program to learn and time consuming for the initial setup depending on your computer saviness. The database described in the rest of this article was created out of many hours of trial and error and is still undergoing tweaking.