Physical Layer - The reason I call it the physical layer is because that’s how I lay out things on my hard drive. Although I’m still dealing with 1’s and 0’s stored on my hard drive, it’s easier for me to think of these as physical objects.

The best analogy I can come up with is to think of your photos as books. A library does not buy 5 copies of a book to file under the author, subject, genre…etc. What they do is file the books in one way and you can look up books in several different ways using a catalog or in this wonderful day and age, a computer. This makes everyone’s life a lot easier. Applying the same concepts to photography will make digital asset management a lot easier as well.
The first bit I’ve adopted from the DAM book, is about physical file organization. I start out with an “ORIGINALS” folder as my main container with subfolders of approximately 4GB chunks. The 4GB chunks are split further by individual shoots. For example, if I was shooting at the Bronx Zoo and used up 6 x 1gb cards then I would have the following file structure:

[img place holder]

ORIGINALS

–NB_RAW0001_20060316

—–BronxZoo

——–imgx

——–imgy

–NB_RAW0002_20060316

—– BronxZoo

——–imgz

What this gives me is the ability to combine folders when optical storage sizes increase. It also keeps my archives in a chronological order. The subfolders will also be small enough that thumbnail viewing will not take a long time and software packages will not run into out of memory issues or other limitations. It keeps things a lot more manageable. After my image files are properly “filed” the hard part of creating an easily accessible logical catalog begins…

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