Continued from here.

Yesterday I wrote about the fact that digital cameras these days are basically supercomputers generating huge amounts of data that our poor little human brains couldn’t keep up with. The fact that we try to keep track of our photos like they were old-fashioned prints just doesn’t make sense and ends up overwhelming us. What we need to do is get our geek on. We need to get smart and use all of that data that’s being created to make our lives easier instead of harder. It’s time to begin thinking of your photos as records in a… gulp… database. (Click here to keep reading)

Let’s get this over and done with. Say it with me: Database. Database, database, database, database, database, database, database.

Database. See, it’s not a word to be frightened of.

I hear you saying, “But photos are pictures! They’re not financial accounts. They’re not even a record of my wine collection. I don’t want to have to create an Excel sheet just to keep track of my memories!” I’m right there with you. When it comes to my photos, I have no desire to make my life any harder than it already is. Still, my digital photos are part of a database, the biggest database I manage, and without that database I’d probably lose my mind.

What’s a database? Simply put, a database is a collection of records about things. Going back to the previous paragraph, a database could be a collection of records about the wines you’ve bought: when you bought each bottle, how much it cost, the vintage and winery, how it tasted, whether you should buy a case or pawn it off on your Uncle Marty. Because this information is about the wine, it’s called meta (meaning “above”) data (meaning information). The information isn’t the wine itself; it just describes facts about the wine.

Coming back to digital photos… each photo you take has two parts: the image data (the picture) and the metadata (information about the photo). If you’re using Windows you can easily check this metadata out by right-clicking on any photo, clicking “Properties,” clicking on the “Summary” tab on the properties dialog that pops up and then clicking the “Advanced” button at the bottom of the dialog box.

You can see in the figure above that in addition to the photo, my camera captured all sorts of other information about the image like exposure time, ISO speed, whether I was using a flash or not, even when kind of camera I took the photo with. If I scroll down I can also see there’s a spot for a title, the subject, keywords, comments and more.

As you can see, each file is like a record in a database. Yes, it’s got your photo in it, but the file is also keeping track of all kinds of information that could be useful to help you keep track of your photos. Go ahead and open up the properties for a few more photos. Some cameras store different information, so see what your camera added to the mix.

You might be thinking, “This is cool, but you can’t seriously expect me to right-click on every single photo and add this metadata on my own. That’s just craziness!” You’re right. Like every database, you need to use a program to help you index and keep track of your records. You need a program that will help you quickly search through the metadata for the photos you want. Ideally, this program will also make it easy to add new information to photos – hopefully doing it in batches rather than photo by photo.

Next time on Keeping Track of Everything we’ll put together a comprehensive list of what the average, non-professional photographer needs to help keep track of photos and then we’ll look into some programs that might fit our list.