Photographer's Guide to the Digital Lifecycle: Real-life workflow scenarios for managing still and motion photography assets by Ben Greisler

Peachpit/New Riders 2011, softcover, 7 x 9", 312 pages, color illustrations

Photographers, videographers, and other creative content makers are dealing with a new world of media that presents the challenge of managing all their raw and prepared data produced in the creative process. The framework for managing this data must go beyond Digital Asset Management (DAM) to the holistic data lifecycle perspective

Enter Photographer's Guide to the Digital Lifecycle. Offering much more than a DAM book—this is a comprehensive guide to modern, real-world digital asset storage practices. It goes beyond things like metadata and how to use DAM applications and looks at the whole process, from ingest to archive. In addition to the usual DAM concerns of metadata and tagging, Photographer's Guide to the Digital Lifecycle brings to light the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of the digital storage mediums we choose and the best techniques for applying them. It looks beyond DAM software to real-life examples for keeping your data safe and managed, from the moment of production to its status as historical artifact.