Database Best Practices

[bradsayers]

Hello everyone!

I was using Picasa for years but in light of no further development, I began searching for another product. After hours of research and testing several trial software, I decided to go with ACDSee Pro and have been very happy with the product.

I want to get more serious in my hobby and for starters, want to employ best practices regarding database information. I have about 62,000 images spanning 10 years.

My main question at this time is: what are the reasons to use the ACDSee database instead of IPTC? The latter seems comprehensive and I wonder if it's redundant to use both.

Thanks, and glad to be a member of the ACDSee community!

Brad

[Glen Barrington]

Well, there is no cost to using both. I do as a hedge against having to move the photos to a different environment. I know I can move almost all the metadata to the new environment that way.

The biggest advantage of using the catalog database is the speed of searching. With embedded data, to find something based on metadata, ACDSee has to read the metadata of EACH photo and read the record looking for hits on the search criteria. But with the Catalog database., ACDSee can create index files to speed up the searches and eliminate the physical manipulation of the photo file itself.

You might not see much difference if your total stored images are fewer than 2000-3000 photos, but it can make a huge difference with larger batches of photos.

[Emil]

Imho the major difference is, that IPTC was designed to be used with image files only, while proprietary AC tags may be assigned to any type of file and even sub folders.

There's also differences in the implementation of the corresponding tags. E.g. AC keywords allow hierarchy, IPTC keywords don't, AC keywords and IPTC keywords also allow different character sets,

Tags like collections and categories don't exist in IPTC.

The search options vary between both.

[Emil]

With embedded data, to find something based on metadata, ACDSee has to read the metadata of EACH photo and read the record looking for hits on the search criteria. But with the Catalog database., ACDSee can create index files to speed up the searches and eliminate the physical manipulation of the photo file itself.

Imho everything excluded from the db can not be found at all. AC never searches within the file base. (Only the indexer does.) But both, AC and IPTC meta data, are copied to the db.

[bradsayers]

Thanks for the responses.

One of the reasons for my using the IPTC db was to embed information in the images that was not tied to any particular software....

However, with over 60,000 pics, I found that if I edited IPTC data it was seen as a new file and my cloud service was going to upload 150 gbs of files.....so I abandoned that for the moment and am only adding this information to newly imported images not existing....for all those, I will use ACDSee db.

[Emil]

Keeping meta data in a local db and mapping meta data in to the images files, both have there pros and cons. I'd love to always map meta data into sidecar files, even for images that allow embedding of meta data (jpg, tiff...). But I'd never ever upload files into a cloud. That's just my personal preference and part of our office politics.

[bradsayers]

I use sugarsync to back up my computer including my photos. I also use google photos which I like because of the automatic tagging that's quite good. They have a good app for the iPhone too. Finally, I back all up to an external drive. I like the quick and easy access to these images from my phone...which I use quite often actually (sharing with friends and family).