As professional photographers who are always in need of a good cataloging and archival strategy - we continually strive for one setup that is scalable and would work for our needs. And I think, speaking for many, we would love if that setup involved only one piece of software. And if we could fit that archive onto a single external hard drive and take it on the road with us just in case a client needs an image that would be even better. I was never thrilled with iView Media Pro (now Expression Media) or Extensis Portfolio. They worked but I always felt that a better option would present itself sooner rather than later and I was and still am hoping that Lightroom can step in and take over.

Hence, while talking with a peer this past week about cataloging and archiving images, it dawned on me that most professional photographers don't need - or even want an archive of every single image they've ever shot. What I need (speaking only for myself now) is an archive of my best and sellable images - i.e. my master images. The idea was to put all of my select digital images and film scans into one Lightroom catalog. And since all of my selects are completely worked up as tiffs I can save them as jpegs with the least amount of compression (saved at a compression ratio of 12 in Photoshop) and then import them into Lightroom. This gives me full resolution images for submissions and for delivering the high resolution versions to clients.

I realize jpeg versions of the high resolution images is not the highest quality format but for most of my clients the difference between a full resolution tiff file and a high quality jpeg file (if it was only saved once) is very small. In fact, most every stock agency around these days delivers high quality jpegs to their clients, not tiff files.

And with all of those images keyworded and with full metadata I have a mobile office ready to submit images and deliver the final product. The Library module with it's extensive search functions will aid in selecting images for submissions (especially Lightroom 2 Beta with it's very advanced search options). I can save those selections of images as a collection and then I can use Lightroom's web galleries to build the actual submissions. And finally, by saving the images as jpegs I can fit a very large number of images on a portable external hard drive - 10,000 to 20,000 images is not an issue at all. Even with that many images in Lightroom, since they are jpegs, the program should be able to operate at very tolerable speeds.

All in all it works quite well and as Lightroom becomes a cataloging and archiving software - as it surely will - adding more images won't be an issue. Or at least that is the hope.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael