Product Description

Most people are awash in digital photos—some taken, some received—stuffed here and there in random folders and albums across a hard drive. In The Digital Shoebox, Sarah Bay Williams, creator of the image archiving system used by the Academy Awards®, shares her foolproof method for effectively organizing, finding, and sharing photos so you never lose track of your most precious memories.

Unlike many books on digital photography that are driven by software, The Digital Shoebox teaches readers an easy-to-remember and easy-to-repeat system that doesn’t feel like homework or require learning lots of complicated software applications. Part 1 of the book guides readers through the seven most important steps for organizing photos; Part 2 is packed with tips on ways to enjoy and share those photos. Each chapter closes with some slightly more advanced information, should readers want to get "technical."

Based on the author’s experience as photography coordinator for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and as someone who simply loves taking photos, The Digital Shoebox is the first concise and user-centered guide solely dedicated to organizing a personal digital photography collection.

• Takes a fun and easy-to-implement approach to asset management, featuring a friendly writing style and charming illustrations
• Teaches the seven key steps needed to help users keep photos organized, available, and safe
• Includes a "Beyond the Box" section at the end of each chapter for more advanced readers who want to move beyond the basics

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #522868 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 168 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780321660497
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

From the Back Cover
Most people are awash in digital photos—some taken, some received—stuffed here and there in random folders and albums across a hard drive. In The Digital Shoebox, Sarah Bay Williams, creator of the image archiving system used by the Academy Awards®, shares her foolproof method for effectively organizing, finding, and sharing photos so you never lose track of your most precious memories.

Unlike many books on digital photography that are driven by software, The Digital Shoebox teaches readers an easy-to-remember and easy-to-repeat system that doesn’t feel like homework or require learning lots of complicated software applications. Part 1 of the book guides readers through the seven most important steps for organizing photos; Part 2 is packed with tips on ways to enjoy and share those photos. Each chapter closes with some slightly more advanced information, should readers want to get "technical."

Based on the author’s experience as photography coordinator for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and as someone who simply loves taking photos, The Digital Shoebox is the first concise and user-centered guide solely dedicated to organizing a personal digital photography collection.

• Takes a fun and easy-to-implement approach to asset management, featuring a friendly writing style and charming illustrations
• Teaches the seven key steps needed to help users keep photos organized, available, and safe
• Includes a "Beyond the Box" section at the end of each chapter for more advanced readers who want to move beyond the basics

About the Author
Sarah Bay Williams served as communications photography coordinator for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2004 to 2008, managing hundreds of thousands of digital photos for a growing historic collection. She also enjoyed attending and working at five Oscars presentations where she managed up to ten photographers at a time. Williams is now the Ralph M. Parsons Fellow in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Customer Reviews

Stuck in the Shoebox
I'm of two minds about this book. If you are a casual shooter who takes pictures of family events and trips you might find this book useful. More serious photographers should look for something with more depth.

The book includes information on storing your photos, sharing them with others and saving images that others share with you, as well as appendixes on time, file formats and metadata. The main theme could have been conveyed in a short article, or perhaps even summarized in a single sentence: store your photographs on your computer by month and year and keep a calendar of what you shoot.

Actually, this is the technique that many photographers followed during the dim days of film. I stored my negatives in date order in shoe boxes and kept a loose-leaf book of contact sheets marked with the date of the shoot. If I wanted to recover an image, I looked in the loose leaf book for the approximate date, searched the contact sheets for the image I wanted, and then retrieved the negatives for that date. If my memory was weak so that I couldn't remember when I shot the picture of six locomotives pulling a heavy train up to El Cajon pass, I searched the calendar for hints.

In the early days of computers, similar automated filing systems were called flat files, but folks soon realized the potential of relational data bases that could retrieve the same item in several different ways. Today, using Adobe Lightroom, I type Cajon and locomotive into a space and all the locomotive images I took there pop up. If I couldn't remember where in California I took the pictures, I could type in California and locomotive and the pictures would be presented to me, along with several others that could be quickly sorted through.

Serious photographers will want to insure that their pictures are not lost due to computer failure, or otherwise, and will want to be able to retrieve them easily. Even though my main catalog only contains about 2,500 pictures of the perhaps 100,000 I've taken in the last 10 years, these pictures are so varied that it might take me hours to find just the images I want using the shoebox method if I had to, say, make a slide presentation to a bird watchers' club. With good cataloging software, it takes seconds. And modern software, unlike the methods Williams suggests, makes it easy to backup files. Moreover, cataloging software, like Lightroom, often includes a top-notch photo editor. The reference that best shows how to manage digital assets with available computer systems is "The DAM Book" by Peter Krogh.

The author does cover other subjects that the casual user can benefit from. For example she talks about preserving original images whenever you tinker with an image, as when you resize, and points out that one should resize pictures that you attach to e-mail so as not to overload the receiver's mailbox. On the other hand there are few practical instructions on how to resize. Moreover, much of the material in the book looks like filler material. I couldn't see much relevance in the explanation of how time is kept.

Williams' shoe-box method is only for the most casual of photographers. Serious photographers need more.

Good book for those who don't trust photo management software
This book was given to me for review purposes.

The digital shoebox is a book that aims to teach digital photographers how to store their photographs on their computer so that they are safe and easily accessible.

In the book, author Sarah Bay Williams teaches that the best way to organise your digital photographs is not by using software but by creating your own catalogue system and sticking to it.

Ms. Williams instructs the reader to create folders or directories for each year, and then folders within the year folders for each month. Then within each year, special folders would be created which would contain copies of photographs that are to be printed, emailed, posted online, or used in some other way. The reason behind these special folders is that your original photographs should remain untouched so if you wanted to reduce the size of a photograph so that you could email it or post it on the Internet somewhere, you would copy the original into a special folder, make your changes to it and email it from there.

This book very strongly emphasises backing up your entire photograph library. This is something that cannot be stressed strongly enough in this reviewers opinion. For most of us, our computer is the only place we have these files. We don't print them and unlike film, there is no negative that we can safely store away for safe keeping. All hard drives will eventually fail. It's not a question of if, but when. So following the advice in this book will see each reader have not only a copy of their files on a different hard drive should their usual hard drive fail, but a copy stored outside the house somewhere in the case of an emergency where the computer is lost or destroyed.

While I personally agree that your original photographs should be protected at all times and that good backups are extremely important, I can't help believing that the filing system the author has readers create is overly complex, leads to much duplication and will be an administrative nightmare as your library grows over the years. Especially the special folders mentioned earlier, these are nothing more than `albums' in most photo management software. The album just stores a link to the original file and not the file itself thereby removing the need for multiple copies of the same file in different locations on your computer.

The instructions for creating the folders and for doing anything else technical are given for both Mac and PC users, so both wold feel at home.

This book will be very useful to those that dislike or distrust photograph management software like iPhoto on the Mac or Windows Photo Gallery on the PC. The author's style and the size of the book at only 155 pages including the index, makes for an easy read. One thing that I very much liked was that the "screen shots" are actually hand-drawn images, rather than the normal actual screen shots. This was a nice detail and gives the book a bit of a personality and makes it less of a technical manual.

Take Control of Photo Orgainization
Digital Shoebox: How to Organize, Find, and Share Your Photos, The

Written by a professional with a background in archival management, this colorful little book provides a sensible system to manage digital photo storage. The easy to follow step by step instructions include lots of colorful illustrations that add a fun, light hearted touch to what I once considered an overwhelming task. This book ends the frustration of camera and editing programs putting photo files where you can't find them. It teaches how to disable auto open features and put the control back in your hands. Basic organization is covered in seven steps with specific instruction for both PCs and Macs. Additional subjects include file formats, printing, photos from friends and the web, copyrights, metadata and a glossary.

Not being a particularly well organized person, I thought while this book was necessary, reading it would be a chore. To my surprise, I found it interesting and fun to both read and apply. From camera set up to file back up plans, The Digital Shoebox has enabled me to sort all my photos and create and implement a back plan so I know my memories are safe. While probably not for professional photographers it provides an easy to use plan for personal collections. I'd recommend this book to anyone who doesn't have a good working file management plan and as a sure to be appreciated gift for friends.