Mike Pulsifer Photography mike-pulsifer.org

Managing Your Image Library

As we design more and more slide decks, we inevitably create or consume an ever greater number of images, whether they're photographs, icons, or whatever.  The problem is, however, it becomes a problem keeping track of them all on your hard drive.  Whether you're using Windows or the Mac, this is where you see how the modern file systems are failing us.  To make it easy to find these files for later use, you need more than just the file names.  There's a lot more information (metadata) that's needed.

If you have an image management application such as Lightroom, Aperture, or iPhoto, you could use it.  They have decent metadata support, but you'd be mixing all of these random images with your own library.

Since I already have a license for Bento, I thought I'd give that a try.  For those who don't know what Bento is, it's the smaller, lighter, and easier to use sibling of FileMaker, a powerful and cross-platform desktop and server-based database.  Though FileMaker is cross-platform, Bento is Mac only.  Bento lets you create new databases, called libraries, easily and with a completely visual interface.  No programming or understanding of databases or how they work is needed.

Now, even if I didn't have to worry about mixing my personal photography with these images I use for my slides, I wouldn't use iPhoto or the like because of the information I want to track with the images.  I want to be able to track and search by the image type and/or keywords and I want to be able to track the licensing information so I know what I can and can't do legally with the images.

The template that I created (the download link at the end of this post) includes the following fields:

• Source
• Background (color)
• Type
• Keywords
• License
• Credit (person or site)
• Source URL
• Attribution

That last field is a calculated field, meaning it takes the license, credit, and URL fields and creates a string of text for attribution that you can use in your slides when attribution is required.

Image Assets Betno Template (download) by Mike Pulsifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.