Image management

Submitted by Peter on Sun, 2011-01-16 14:50

Image management covers the process from importing your images from your camera to displaying the final result in a usable fashion, in galleries by subject, on Web sites, and includes a good facility to search for image files at any stage of the management process. You use one or more software applications. Most of the management oriented applications are rubbish when you have more than a few photographs, a good reason to search through the whole range of applications for the one that will save you the most time down the track when you connection expands.

Web based?

A Web based image management system is a great help when you are travelling light because you can do anything anywhere with any image using only the resources of internet cafes. Currently there are no suitable Web applications. They all have limitations. The best approach is to use a Web site to upload and store your images untouched for download when you return to your home/office base. Yes, use Web applications to show some temporary images but keep all the originals untouched.

Editor?

Some image management software includes editing functions but most have just the minimum to weed out failed images and trim marginal images. The best editors are external. Use an image management application that lets you specify your choice of image editors and possibly more than one choice.

External programs and libraries

A lot of the open source image management applications use external programs and libraries for common functions. You then have to research the external libraries or very carefully test the functions to ensure the processing is of good quality. I find a lot of applications that edit images by doing really stupid things. One piece of rubbish said it could edit PNG, RAW, and other high quality images. When I looked into the code and read the development forums, I found out the application internally turned the images into JPEG rubbish then made a change then converted back to the original format. If you made several alternations, each alteration involved a conversion to rubbish then a conversion back to the original format, giving you a giant loss of quality every time.

Applications should internally process every image at the same quality as the original. Conversions to the cheap JPEG format should happen only at the last minute and the original unconverted image should always be kept for future use.

Videos

Yes, your image management application should handle images because almost every camera can now take videos.

Originals should remain original

Your originals should always remain the originals straight out of the camera and never touched by anything. Modified versions should be stored as modified versions with a link back to the original. When you get to the stage of exporting a squashed up JPEG, the file before the JPEG should be kept for future exports. When you need the JPEG in a different size, you should be able to export direct from the original, not try to smear the already messy JPEG over a different size.

JPEG is not a reliable image format

JPEG only stores an approximation of an image. Every time you alter the image part of a JPEG file, JPEG smears the content of the image over the image. If you make a minor change to the size of a JPEG image, the image is blurred. A second minor adjustment blurs the already blurred. You soon end up with dull poor quality images. At this point the uneducated apply the Photoshop unsharp mask to add ugly contrast to the smeary bits. Now you have a cheap looking dull poor quality image.

People with proper training keep their images in a quality format throughout the editing process and only export to JPEG at the last minute. If their camera is limited to producing JPEG files, they immediately import into a quality format.

JPEG does store extra information that is not in some other image format files. When you import JPEG from a camera that provides only JPEG, you should import the JPEG into an image management program that saves all the extra information in a searchable format.

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