Digital Asset Management and DAMeasy

Upload entire directory trees of images captioned with IPTC information to an ftp location	AND	DAMeasy builds an html mirror of your ftp directories that search engines love - complete with RSS feeds, keyword indexes, directories of thumbnails and html pages optimized for search engines using the IPTC data. DAMeasy also makes nice flash based presentations of the images.

Interested in using DAMeasy? Interested in some of the concepts involved?

Then contact me. I'd love to talk with you about it.

 

I wrote DAMeasy because I have strong opinions about Digital Asset Management software and thought I could demonstrate some of them with a simple program

As a photographer I believe:	DAM software should then:	DAMeasy then does this:
I should only go through the painful task of captioning images once	I already caption and keyword images I send to a client. DAM software should use the same system. Old DAM software used to require me to re-enter this information. Why should I do this twice? IPTC and XMP metadata are great because the data travels with the image. It doesn't reside elsewhere lie some proprietary database. (Even the XMP "side car", is an OK kludge until the people making the RAW file formats document their formats and make space in the image files themselves for XMP and IPTC data). Data that travels with the image should, in my opinion, become the standard for DAM. Any software that makes a photographer re-enter data pertaining to an image, or doesn't rewrite newly entered data to IPTC data or XMP data, or otherwise locks the photographer's data into a proprietary database that requires the photographer to be a loyal customer is a waste of a photographer's time and money.	DAMeasy relies 100% on IPTC and XMP data. No extra data is required to be entered anywhere else.
I should only go through the painful task of organizing images once	DAM software should use the directory tree system standard to all operating systems for its primary mode of organization, rather than adding a complex organization system on top. Two organization systems create problems: 1) Photographers have to organize twice: Once in the OS and once in the DAM software. That is adding work - not simplicity 2) Problems arise when a photographer moves an image in the OS organization and the DAM software organization can't find the image. Might sound trivial, but imagine if you had to move your images to a new hard drive or computer. What happens then? Why some DAM software requires another level of organization on top of the directory tree system is sometimes mysterious. There are some benefits, of course - for example wanting the same image to be in two separate groups of images during editing. Hopefully there is a very compelling benefit to the new organization system, but sometimes this extra layer of organization serves only to lock photographers into buying new versions of their software down the road because there will be no way to export their organization to any other software. There are some clever things that DAM software could be doing to work within the OS organization by directories.	DAMeasy mirrors 100% the directory organization that has been uploaded. If the photographer wishes to reorganize, the photographer only does it in one place.
I'd like my images to be found on the web as easily as possible	DAM software should make images really easy to find and very available on the web when the photographer wants them promtoted this way.	DAMeay uses the IPTC data and smart ways to build Search Engine Optimized (SEO) html pages so that people using search engines will find a photographer's images.

• Template driven - The image pages and thumbnail pages are based on an easy to modify html template and css file
• Search Engine optimized - each page is optimized in many ways to be found and indexed by search engines
• html is synchronized to the ftp directory - change an image name, move a directory, and DAMeasy automatically makes the changes in the public html pages.
• Script reads if you held the camera vertically or horizontally and then rotates the images automatically so that they are all upright. The EXIF data is then rewritten to tag the image as having been rotated correctly.
• DAMeasy is only 750 lines of Perl code (with the help of the venerable Image::Magick, Image::ExifTool, DBI and Mysql modules)

Interested in using DAMeasy? Interested in some of the concepts involved? Then contact me. I'd love to talk with you about it.