I am a photographer and a software engineer by trade. Over the years I have amassed a huge collection of photographs of both film (mainly slides) and digital images. Some of these images have a very high value to me, some are irreplaceable.
One problem I have encountered is where and how to store my collection of Images. One source of reference was Peter Krogh’s book The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers. (Nov 2005).
This introduced me to DAM. DAM is based on standard document control systems with simple rules:
Being organised
Do No Harm
Be Safe With Your Data
Back Up Supporting Documents
Make three copies of all important asset items.
see: Simple DAM rules.
These rules are standard practice in the IT world but not normally applied to photography.
These are very like the sames rules I use as a Software engineer to manage software projects but applied to photography.
So my idea was to write some software. ImgArchive is that software.
ImgArchive is based on DAM practices and IT Software Control Systems such as Azure DevOps, SVN and GIT.
How Software Control Systems fits-in
Source computer code is made up of individual files which are then compiled into a computer program. These source files are expensive to produce and can change many times and can be moved from one project to another over a long period of years. It is rare for them to be deleted, and many of the source code control systems make deleting source code files difficult. The only main difference is that they store a text files in a repository and not binary files such as a digital image.
This makes an important difference, Text files can be shared and updated. The changes can be then merged back into repository, the only the changes stored in the repository. This is known a non-exclusive check-out for changes, i.e. files are copied out of the repository for changes (checked-out) then back in after modification and a new version made (checked-in). Text files can be changed by a number of people and be merged latter.
In the case of binary and hence digital images, they can only be changed exclusively by one person using one copy of the original image i.e. (checked-out) exclusively. Once the modification complete copied back into the repository (checked-in) to make a new version..
However these source code control systems can store binary files but unlike text files can not be shared between users or edits.