Digital Asset Management In Action With Mama's Photography

Gerard Murphy - November 09, 2011 | Archiving, Backup, Digital Asset Management, Photographers, Uncategorized

Digital asset management is not new. Digital Asset Management is a fancy term for what photographers have always done….just not always digitally. Photographers always had backup systems, metadata, catalogs, filing systems, originals and derivatives.

A woman ahead of her time, my great-grandmother decided to travel the world. As an older widow in the 1950s she didn’t just go to Yellowstone and Yosemite, she visited Thailand, Tibet, China, Japan and Iran (seriously!). One small detail… she did this alone! No guides. No experience speaking the language. Just Mama, a small suitcase, and a decent camera. While she was there, she took some amazing photos. Some look like they could have been shot today. Some show the time period.

She kept the negatives securely locked away in a fire safe vault. For the prints, she carefully stored them in a photo album. She took notes in the margins with the locations and dates. My mother became the caretaker for Mama’s photos and converted the slides into digital files using Go Photo. My mother then sent them out to the family. Prints now are prominently displayed in my sister’s dinning room among many other places. (more…)