Hi, >[...] i think you will find that defining keywords is an inadequate > way of filing your images. there is an implied taxonomy of subjects and > topics in any system that i have heard any working photographer describe. > sunsets at Valley Fire. sunset is a time of day. Valley of Fire State Park > is a state park and in nevada which is in the western US which is in the US. > Extensis Portfolio has mind share. it doesn't support hierarchical > categories. IMatch does, but it has some stupidities that i don't like, one [...]
the important things to include are who, what, when, where and why, as usual. Trying to define a hierarchical system is likely to become very restrictive, very quickly. The simplest and probably most effective way of categorising photos is to provide space for a caption which makes sense, i.e. is intended for humans, e.g. 'Sunset. Valley of Fire State Park, USA. November 2004" and space for a large number of search terms, e.g. "landscape wildlife weather nevada family holiday Marge Homer Bart Simpson" etc. The system looks in both fields for matching terms when you do a search. Note that even though you might type them all into a single field at the interface, they are not necessarily stored or searched as a single field in the database. A simple bit of parsing can add each word to an indexed keyword to speed up searching in relatively large databases. But even this is likely to be unnecessary for the small volumes most of us deal with. Another thing to consider is how you deal with dates. It's all very well putting in a complete date such as 29-Nov-2004 when you're cataloguing the stuff close to the event, but several years later when you want to find it your memory won't be that precise and you'll be thinking 'it was sometime later 2004, I think, or maybe 2005'. I think this is the general approach used for museum collections and similar. Here's what they do in Canada: http://tinyurl.com/5t7mn I imagine similar institutions have similar information on the web. -- Cheers, Bob
