I have been preaching the importance of metadata as MerlinOne’s application support manager for some time. It is a common theme in my blogs.
Well, recently, I had a chance to use my own advice. For those of you that know me, I am a former photojournalist, and I still take pictures for my own pleasure. I live in Utah, a very photo-worthy state, and whenever I have time, I grab my cameras and head off to photograph Utah’s magnificent landscapes.
As I re-immersed myself in making photographs, I joined a local photo club the Salt Lake Print Society, and I have tried to force myself to get out there and have my content judged by others.
So, on a recent Saturday morning near the end of August, I had to ask my wife the date. I realized that the deadline for the Utah State Fair photography competition was that very day. I had let it slip my mind, thinking all along, the end of August was still weeks away.
Well, I have to tell you, metadata made it possible for me to enter the contest that day, and in fact, I entered it with hours to spare, and still had time to enjoy my Saturday.It was about 10 AM that morning when I realized my deadline issue, this only 30 minutes or so after I remarked to my wife, that I was looking forward to a nice, relaxed weekend with nothing planned. We don’t have many of those.
Then, my realization…deadline…today…I haven’t even thought about the contest that I had wanted to enter.
So it was here that my workflow took over. I was able to search through my photo collection, which is a modest 2 TB, for the photos I wanted to look at for constest submission.
The contest has rules, pictures must have been shot within a certain time frame, easy to narrow that down, camera create date, and then I was able to search for content I had tagged as “completed”…my terminology for items that had been processed in Photoshop, and were printer ready.
I was able to quickly find my “completed” images from the last year, pick three, and send them to my printer. While I was waiting for them to print, I called the person that does framing for me and asked him to fire up his dry mount press. I then also printed entry forms to my other printer, and got dressed (I know, too much information). Once done printing, I snagged the three prints from the printer, drove to the frame shop (here is my plug for Right Angle Framing in Park City, because they do a great job) and waited while Ed mounted my 13×17-inch prints to foam core board.
Then, it was off to Salt Lake City to deliver them to the State Fair grounds.
I was home by one in the afternoon, and was able to slip back into weekend-I have nothing planned-mode.
I could not have done this without metadata and a workflow that includes adding captions and tags to photographs at the front-end of the workflow.
So metadata and digital asset management really do matter. It saved my weekend.
Oh, I took home two ribbons.