By Peter Krogh
First Edition November 2005 
ISBN: 0-596-10018-3
296 pages, $34.95 US

Can you find your digital photographs when you need them, or do you spend more time rifling through your hard drive and file cabinets than you'd like? Do you have a system for assigning and tracking content data on your photos? If you make a living as a photographer, do your images bear your copyright and contact information, or do they circulate in the marketplace unprotected?

As professional photographer and author Peter Krogh sees it, "your DAM system is fundamental to the way your images are known, both to you and to everyone else." DAM, or Digital Asset Management, in the world of digital photography refers to every part of the process that follows the taking of the picture, through final output and permanent storage. Anyone who shoots, scans or stores digital photographs, is practicing some form of digital asset management. Unfortunately, most of us don't yet know how to manage our files (and our time) very systematically, or efficiently.

In The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, Krogh brings clarity to the often overwhelming task of managing digital photographs, with a solid plan and practical advice for fellow photographers on how to file, find, protect and re-use photographs. Following a thorough overview of the DAM system and de-mystifications of metadata and digital archiving, Krogh focuses on best practices for digital photographers using Adobe Photoshop CS2. He explains how to use Adobe Bridge, the new CS2 navigational software that replaces the File Browser introduced in Photoshop 7, with full details on integrating Bridge, Camera Raw and Digital Asset Management software.

Compellingly presented in four-color format, The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers brings Krogh's award-winning creative approach to a subject that could have been technically intimidating. Instead, Krogh's twenty years of experience and instructive visual storytelling make this material not only accessible, but compulsory reading for serious digital photographers.

Sample Chapter

Member Reviews

The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Digital Photographers
Reviewed by Jerry Callaghan
It was not easy accepting what I read in The DAM Book by Peter Krogh. I am very used to a file structure for my images that is based on folders by subject content. You know the routine: flowers, people, models... the list goes on. Under those folders I have subfolders to further break down the files. It works. Sort of.

The problem with this type of structure is you are constantly adding new images to the existing folders. That makes backing up a very tiresome ordeal. Enter Mr. Krogh and his "bucket" system.

In Peter Krogh's system, all folders are sized to a CD, DVD or whatever media you use to backup with. All new images go into a folder. For example you can store images in a folder named "DVD_001" till it reaches the maximum size of the "bucket". In the case of a DVD it would be around 4 GB. When that "bucket" is filled you move on to DVD_002 again without regard to image subject.

I had a hard time accepting this theory. Yet I was tired of always having to re-backup my images because I was adding new images to a folder that had already been backed up. I am trying the "bucket" system and so far so good.

What makes Peter Krogh's system work is his use of digital asset management (DAM) software. The software will keep track of the images and know what "bucket" the image is in. I am not fully there yet. I am only using Adobe Bridge but so far so good. I will be shopping for a DAM program in the very near future.

The DAM Book by Peter Krogh is much more than a book on how to file and backup your images for safekeeping. That is its strong point. Yet it includes a lot of information on workflow. It is a book definitely worth picking up and browsing through. Getting over the use of a folder system for your images that is based on image content is not easy. Yet, the system Peter Krogh uses does work. As the number of images in a photographer's collection gets larger a system like that in The DAM Book will become a necessity. It makes life easier for the digital photographer. In the event of a major system failure like losing a hard drive, having a simple backup system that is up to date will be all that matters.