FocalPower…the blog

Last weekend at WordCamp San Francisco, I had an interesting discussion with a fellow blogger who was suffering from a common issue.  He was in the process of migrating his blog from one blogging service to another and was stuck when it came to his photos.  This is a perfect example of not only how having a separate photo hosting service would have made his life easier, but also an example of why photographs need to have their metadata populated.

This particular blogger had used the local photo storing feature of his blogging services (a services I had never heard of before).  Now that he was trying to migrate his blog to WordPress his migration was delayed because he couldn’t get his photos out of the old blogging platform and those photos were critical to his blog.  This is a classic example of where proprietary features of a poorly designed service often lock in users.  With our connected world, abstraction is our friend.  Having the key pieces of content in systems designed for each piece of content would have saved this blogger a lot of time.  If he had his photos hosted separate from his blog, he would already be running on WordPress and be a much happy blogger.

Luckily for the this particular blogger, he still had local copies of all his photos.  Unfortunately for him, he didn’t that them well organized or tagged with metadata.  All the text describing the photos (i.e., captions, descriptions) was entered into his old blogging system separate from the actual photos.  If he had at least put that text into the photo’s meta data, he would at least have been able to re-upload them to a new photo hosting service and have all the photo descriptions automatically pulled out of the photos.  It would have been a bit more work for him, but less work than he is now facing.

What can Photographers (as well as other bloggers) learn from this experience?

First, have a work flow for dealing with your photos.  This is quite obvious for most photographers, but maybe not as obvious for bloggers.  Have a consistent and documented way of dealing with your photos helps to ensure you don’t miss key steps as well as ensures you’re growing collection of photos is well organized and consistent.  Nothing is worse than having a collection of 10,000 photos and then not be able to find the one photo a customer asks for.

Second, take advantage of meta data.  Meta data is simply data about data.  It’s another layer of data about your photography.  IPTC photo metadata is an established standard of meta data fields that are used to describe nearly all aspects of a photo.  Not just describing what the photo contains, but also when it was created, who created it, and what license legally protects the photo.  Just about every major photo editing software package supports IPTC metadata and allows you to edit it.  Wether you are a photographer or a blogger, you should be adding in basic meta data about your photos as part of your work flow.  When you upload those photos to a photo sharing service, that meta data should be automatically extracted and made available to you.  Ideally that meta data should be automatically displayed along with your photos, ideally in a configurable manner where you can choose which data to display along with the photo.

So, by documenting your work flow, adhering to it consistently and using the IPTC metadata fields as part of your work flow, photographers can prevent themselves from facing the same portability issue that the afore mentioned blogger faced.  Keeping the meta data about your photos in your master copy of the photos enables you to capitalize on new advancements in the the industry, such as new standards conforming platforms and services, with minimal additional work.

Managing photos online has been a challenge since the start. The one thing that the online photo sharing sites did right was to keep the organization of photos simple (the old KISS principal, Keep it Simple Stupid, still rules). When sharing photos online, you need to be able to upload a photo once and then use it where ever you want. This is the beauty of the flat storage structure. Rather than deciding first how you want to organize your photos, just dump them into a big bucket and organize them later. Even better, configure smart tools to auto organize them based upon the meta data contained within the photos.

Being a Professional Photographer today means wearing many hats; many hats in the operation of your business and, even more importantly, in the way you present your business to the world. Unless you are well known for a specific type of photography, you will need to follow the concept of multiple streams of income and offer your services into multiple vertical markets. Thus, a portfolio that showcases your work for each vertical is needed. However, many times a single photo can fall into multiple portfolios. This is where the power of the flat storage structure shines…after you upload the photo once, you can place it into as many portfolios as you want. The organizational structure is virtual and lives side by side with the actual photos (versus the photos physically living inside your organizational structure).

Likewise, just being a photographer—professional, semi-professional, or enthusiast—requires fun and creativity to keep the spark alive. Many times this means creating something new or just capturing a moment as it presents itself. And many times this also means having a photo or two which are worth sharing but don’t fall into your organization structure (or at least not yet). Again, the flat storage structure allows you to just toss it in the bucket and share those photos just by themselves. Damn the organization….full speed ahead!

Ahh, but the pain of manually organizing hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of photos! Technology to the rescue…to the rescue of time wasted doing something manually that computers can do much faster and dynamically. Smart tools that allow you to create portfolios on the fly based upon meta data contained within the photos. This is where the investment in a strong and consistently executed work flow comes in. Always keyword your photos. Always add as much IPTC meta data possible about where the photo was taken, what the photo depicts, etc. Once that data in there, it can be leveraged in the future to save you time and give you dynamic control over your images. A portfolio that dynamically changes as you add new photos to your bucket. The ability to quickly create new portfolios to display your work in new and fresh ways. This is when the fun begins!

Make sure that the photography tools you choose are flexible and utilize technology to save you time and not lock you into something that can’t be changed easily in the future. Your time is the most valuable asset you have…closely followed by your skill and photographs!