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By Leah Murray - guest blogger, photographer and digital imaging artist
In these days of digital imaging, lots of small businesses have trouble locating the image files they want for their business when they want them. We can sometimes spend hours, days or (gasp!) weeks hunting down just the right photo for our web designer or for that special customer who called out of the blue and needs to be impressed right away with our product.
Mainly this happens because lots of us think of images as "not documents" - and so the individual images tend to get filed "creatively" rather than in a logical, businesslike way. To get control of the images in your business life, you will need to start thinking of them as business assets or documents, much like your customer or supplier records, and handle them accordingly.
So let's get started.
Start by building up a logical framework for the images to "live" under.
- Some images are for Branding (your logo, your trademark, your colour palette)
- Some are for Sales and Marketing (your product shots and/or your business portraits of yourself, partners, etc)
- Some are for Advertising Media/Campaigns (usually handled on a project by project basis)
What sort of content is in those images? Do you need to keep images of products or images of services? If you have some showing services, is each type of service you offer represented, or are you like a real estate agent who needs to have a photo of themselves smiling warmly in front of one lovely piece of commercial or residential property to represent all the kinds of properties handled?
Are some of your images customer specific? Does it make sense to put either a copy of the image OR a link to the image in the customer's file on your computer? (You do have some customer files on your computer, right?)
Grab a scrap of paper or open a notepad text file, and jot down all your types of images, something like this:
IMAGES
Branding
Logo
Trademark
MyBizPortrait(s)
Stationery
SalesMarketing
ProductImages
SalesTeamPortraits
SalesCampaigns
Print
Web
Email
Projects
RockyMountainTerritory
GaspeTerritory
AllOntario
AllManitoba
Prairies
Bear in mind that YOUR outline is going to look very different than my outline, and that's not only okay, it's good! Your business is unique, after all.
Now let's think about where your images go; with digital imagery, the destination will often determine the starting image. The reason for this is because images that are being printed onto paper or some kind of surface have to be stored at much larger sizes and higher resolution than images that are going to be displayed on a screen.
Does it make sense to keep print (High Resolution or HiRes) and screen (Screen Resolution or ScreenRes) images totally separate for your business, or is it more useful to simply keep the images in the structure you've started with and add a pair of folders appropriately? For example, do you need to set up like this:
IMAGES
Branding
Logo
→HiRes
→ScreenRes
Trademark
→HiRes
→ScreenRes
MyBizPortrait(s)
. . .
Stationery (Almost all of these will be HiRes, as stationery is usually printed.)
→HiRes
SalesMarketing
ProductImages
→HiRes
→ScreenRes
SalesTeamPortraits
→HiRes
→ScreenRes
SalesCampaigns
Print
→HiRes
Web
→ScreenRes
Email
. . .
Projects
RockyMountainTerritory
→HiRes
→ScreenRes
GaspeTerritory
. . .
AllOntario
. . .
AllManitoba
OR would it make better sense to set up like this:
Images
→HiRes
Branding
Logo
Trademark
MyBizPortrait(s)
Stationery
SalesMarketing
ProductImages
SalesTeamPortraits
SalesCampaigns
Print
Web
Email
Projects
RockyMountainTerritory
GaspeTerritory
AllOntario
AllManitoba
Prairies
→ScreenRes
Branding
Logo
Trademark
MyBizPortrait(s)
Stationery
SalesMarketing
ProductImages
SalesTeamPortraits
SalesCampaigns
Print
Web
Email
Projects
RockyMountainTerritory
GaspeTerritory
AllOntario
AllManitoba
If you MOSTLY work with images to be shown on screen and not printed, it might make sense to work in the second type of framework -- if you work as I do in either-or, the first folder layout makes more sense. Some businesses need to file images under the customer files. It's perfectly OK to create a structure that looks like this instead:
MyBizName
Customers
Client1
documents
images
→HiRes
→ScreenRes
linksAndRefs
Client2
. . .
Client3
. . .
WarmLeads
ColdLeads
Suppliers
Suppl001
Suppl002
Suppl003
MyBizNameRefs
Production
Equipment
Transport
Marketing
ProductImages
SalesTeamPortraits
SalesCampaigns
→PrintHiRes
→WebScreenRes
Email
→HiRes
→ScreenRes
Finance
MyAccountingFiles
MyBankingStuff
ComputingAndSoftware
Training
Staffing
PersonalFiles
Me
MySpouse
OurKid001
OurHouse
Creating your outline may take a few hours or a day or two. This is somewhat like some kinds of tea which improve by orders of magnitude when steeped a bit. Don't rush this step, and if you can, find someone to brainstorm with.
- Now begin to create your framework that you've jotted down in the form of a folder structure on your computer, under your Business folders where it's easy to find and back up.
- On a Windows PC, go to My Documents and locate your business folders -- under that, create the folder Images first, then the rest of the folders underneath that.
- On a Mac, click on File on the Finder menu and select New Folder -- or use Finder to go to your business folders and use Command-N to create and name a new folder.)
- Finally, spend 2-3 hours a month for the next six months dragging images into your new folders, using and refining your folder structure for them as you come across your own needs and wants vis-à-vis the images, and start planning and implementing a backup strategy.
- Archive images you are done with "near-line" onto CDs or DVDs or best, onto an external backup hard drive during a yearly review held in "slow season" - remember that you may need these someday for a company history or your 10th or 20th business anniversary, so don't throw them out!
Don't expect to do all this overnight. If you get a blitz of image moving done some rainy weekend over the summer, that's all to the good. Just remember that doing this type of work needs to be scheduled ias a smaller, habitual and repeated task once you start.
You are building a good business computing architecture by standardizing and organizing your folders.
And now think of how proud you'll be when your tech guru or bookkeeper is holding you up as a shining example of organization and business acumen!
Love to hear from you and your experiences with managing your digital image world.
Guest Blogger, technical consultant, photo-journalist and digital imaging artist, fascinated by all things either technical or small business
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