CATALOG SYSTEM FOR
YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS
by Mike Karlsson

When it comes time to set up a catalog system for your photographs, you can go
one of two main ways. You can purchase a ready-made system, or you can build
your own. I suggest building your own for a number of reasons:
- You can set it up exactly the way you want it
- It's cheaper (at least most of the time) than buying one
- Your system can grow, change and expand with you

So how do you do it? Well, it can be as easy, or as hard, as you want it to be.
When I devised my catalog system for my stock photography I decided to try to
keep it as simple as possible. I went with a two-tier system Here's what my
image ID system looks like:
008-0001
The 008 stands for group 8, which in my system stands for law enforcement,
prisons, forensics etc.
The 0001 simply means image number one.
I build chronologically from that point. When I shifted from shooting film to
shooting digital, I added a D after the hyphen. So my image #'s now read
008-D0001, 008-D0002 and so on.

OTHER CATEGORIES

I have roughly fifteen other categories, designated by various numbers. 006 for
instance covers dogs, 004 cats, 020 horses and so on.
I made my system up from the top of my head and when you make your system you
can get it set up in a way it makes most sense to you.
In my system , the image ID's stay the same no matter what the format. For
instance, low resolution images for my website or to e-mail to photobuyers get
an lr (for low resolution) added to the end. 008-D0001lr shows that this is the
low resolution version of image # 008-D0001.
This system makes it easy and fast for me to find high res versions of low res
images referenced by buyers and editors.
I use PhotoMechanic from Camera Bits to keyword and caption my images as well
as searching through captions and keywords. I am very happy with this set-up and
this software works very well for me. If you are looking for a cataloguing
system and you're looking for software I recommend you check them out as they
offer a free demo version on their website.

14/SG0708