Down and dirty “tutorial” for the image catalog system I created…

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I’ve been trying to prepare some photos for backup and archival, and had seen the Contact Sheet II. But it wasn’t what I wanted.

I really wanted a little system I could sort through my photos electroincally by keyword and have thumbnail views, but not have them stored on my hard drive. And ta-boot, I’m quite broke right now - so nothing expensive for me…

After tinkering for a while, I found a solution I am happy with. I create a pdf contact sheet with keywords for each shoot or day I have in my photos directory. Then I merge them into one pdf file. Wa-lah, a searchable catalogue of my images. I can leave the cataloge on my hard drive or burn it to a disk with my archived files.

Here’s how I did my catalog sheets on Photoshop CS2:

• Contact Sheet II on an 8×10 image. I use the source images from a folder, and try to keep the folder contents limited to a few pages (< 10), so I don’t bring my poor machine to it’s knees. I put 16 thumbnails to a page so I can easily see which photos were the best as I browse through them. Then let it chug through the photos.
• Change the canvas size to 8 x 11.5, with the extra being added to the top of the contact sheet page.
• Then in the space at the top, I have room to write a brief description, the date(s), and keywords at the top of the page for the photos. I use vector text. But I’m not sure if the text would be searchable if you didn’t use vector text.

I saved this in an action and made sure to leave the dialogue on for the Contact Sheet II step. Not quite perfect yet, because if there’s more than one page of in the contact sheet images I have to go back and do the 2nd and 3rd steps on the additional pages. But that’s just a click on the 2nd step of the action I created.

Then I create a pdf of each page. Nothing fancy (as in the image below), but usable.

I’ve been using the trial version of PDFCombine to combine each of the pdf contact sheets into a catalogue.

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So there you have it - how to create your own image catalogue, with searchable keywords.

I’d love to hear feedback on if this works for you or if you have another system you use to catalog your photos.