Building your catalog label structure

As stated before, this manual can’t dictate to you how you should construct your catalog and come up with a solution that fully fits your situation and (existing?) image archive. The most important step in building a good catalog is to determine what should be stored in it. Defining catalog labels can be done in a hierarchical order, which means that every label can be itemized into new labels and again and again and.... Itemizing is possible, but is not required. Such an hierarchy of catalog labels is what we call a catalog label structure or in short the label structure. You can create your label structure in the Catalog Explorer. You start the Catalog Explorer by clicking the "spider web" icon in the left Explorer Bar.

The Catalog Explorer has several branches. Since we need to start with a catalog label structure, we open the branch "Catalog Labels". This is where we will start building our catalog structure.

The Catalog Labels branch is by default populated with a couple of categories. A category is a contained for your catalog labels. In IDimager you are free to define as many categories as you like or remove the existing ones. You may notice that the "People" category has a yellow background and blue text. This has no special meaning but is only intended to illustrate that categories can be colored.

The pre-defined categories are intended to represent every possible real live situation. The categories are defined in such a way that any object, person or other entity should fit in one of those.

People (WHO)

This category can be used to define catalog labels for people/persons. Samples are: you, your partner, your kids, Grandma, grandchildren, photo models, cousins, etc...

Because you are free to build a hierarchical structure you can split those up in label groups. For example a group for “Family” can be itemized into Children, Grandparent, Grandchildren and Models. Every one of these labels can then be itemized again.

Determine for yourself what the right level of decomposition is for you. For some it might not be necessary to itemize to the lowest possible value, but a group might be sufficient.

Examples:

Family – Kids – Simone

Photo Models – Annie

Events (WHEN)

This category can be used to define labels for any event. These are normally definable somewhere in time. Possibilities are: “A day at Central Park”, “My Birthday 2005” etc.

Here too you can use hierarchical decompositions. For example, a label “Holidays” can be itemized into “Christmas”, “Halloween”.

Examples::

Trips – Parks – Central Park

Anniversaries – Marriage – John and Mary

Places (WHERE)

This category can be used to define labels for any location. Possibilities are: New York, South America, The Park on the corner of the street, etc.

Here too you can use hierarchical decompositions. For example, a label “Countries” can be itemized into “Tropical Countries”, “Adventurous Countries”.

Examples::

Teen Park – Disney Parks – Florida

Europe - Netherlands – Amsterdam

Objects (WHAT)

This category can be used to define labels for any object. Possibilities are: shoes, church, buildings, keys, advertising, etc.

Here too you can use hierarchical decompositions. For example, a label “Buildings” can be itemized into “Churches”, “Architecture”, and “Classic”.

Examples::

Watches – Seiko – Titanium

Collecting – Key Rings – Advertising – Heineken

Styles (WITH)

This category can be used to define labels for any style. This can be photography styles like “Sunset”, “Nature” or Fashion styles or any other style you can imagine.

Here too you can use hierarchical decompositions. For example, a label “Nature” can be itemized into “City Views”, “Mountain Views”.

Examples::

Macro – Insects – Flies – Tsee Fly

Body Shapes – Weight – Heavy

Keywords

Basically all catalog labels are keywords; nevertheless this category is added for convenience and allows you to add any structure you like. IDimager will also use this category if it reads keywords from your existing images and no category can be determined.

Of course labels in this category can also be itemized.

Other

This category is completely free.

Auto Catalog

IDimager will use this category to store catalog labels that it creates automatically, for examples, catalog labels to identify import sessions or download sessions.

As mentioned before, every image can get multiple catalog labels assigned to it. These labels do not need to be within the same category and can reside in any possible category. By this way you can catalog that one image “taken on Jan’s birthday in Disney Land Paris with Jan, Grandpa Jack on it” and catalog it as Event “Jan’s Birthday”; Place “Disney Land Paris” and Persons “Family - Jan” and “Grandparent – Grandpa Jack”.