Caption Information
If you ever intend to submit your photographs for publication, or to stock photo agencies, you must provide caption information that is as complete as possible for each and every picture.
What information goes in a caption?
The best captions answer two fundamental questions about the picture content:
What (or Who) is it?
Where is it?
The order of importance of those two questions may vary depending upon the circumstances of the picture(s). Shots made in a studio or certain closeup photos may not need to answer the Where? part (although, for biological purposes, the Where? can be important for natural history closeups even though surroundings may not be apparent). For landscapes, scenics, cities, people/culture, and travel shots the Where? is essential.
Certain historical pictures may also have to answer the question When? This may also be true for some photojournalism coverage.
How a picture was made is of no importance to most picture editors. The exception is certain photo magazines that insist on such information. (Then you can do what everyone else does - make it up!)
NSCS Pro 3.0 gives you the speed and flexibility to create outstanding picture captions, the kind that can actually enhance the marketability of your pictures.
In NSCS Pro 3.0 you can create two kinds of information labels: ID Labels and Caption Labels.
ID Labels contain the primary information that answers the Where? and What is it? questions with ease, using pre-defined fields. ID Label information is saved to a database. Later this information can be used as a lookup for speeding up new data entry and for searching and filing. This saved information is also looked up and filled into forms automatically when you enter picture numbers for a submission.
In the illustration here, the top label is the ID Label. Name and copyright symbol plus a Picture Number are added automatically when the labels are created.
Two of the database fields in the ID Label are devoted to Where. These are the State/Country field (second line) and the Locale field (third line). Next to these fields are, respectively, a Filing Code field and a Film Type Code (these are optional).
State/Country is just that - a geo-political entity of a state or province or a country.
Locale is a geo-political sub category such as the name of a major land feature, a national park, a city, or a district.
By using these two pre-defined Where fields, you have information that is quickly searchable.
Three database fields are devoted to What is it (these are the remaining three lines in the ID Label). Words or combinations of words can be found by doing a keyword search of these subject fields.
ID Labels can provide most, if not all, the caption information needed for most pictures. However, NSCS Pro 3.0 also can create Caption Labels (the bottom label on the slide) which can contain a large amount of free-form information to further amplify or expand on what's in the ID Label.
NSCS Pro 3.0 provides a way to generate both kinds of labels simultaneously - Combined Labels. In this case an ID Label and a Caption Label are printed side-by-side on the label sheet.
Filing and Cataloging
The random access method of filing (not recommended)
The information that goes on any picture label should also contain cataloging or filing information. You want to be able to retrieve pictures from a file as quickly and as accurately as possible. Also, you want to be able to re-file pictures quickly and accurately. Obviously we are referring here to the physical files used for storing pictures. Most commonly used are filing cabinets with hanging file folders holding batches of slide sheets and with labels designating the contents of the folder.
Two filing schemes to AVOID AT ALL COSTS are filing by Picture# and chronological filing. These both are non-intuitive and provide extremely poor access to pictures later. With either of these schemes you end up with files that are a series of numbers or dates with no intuitive relationship to images contained in them. This, then, requires constant reference to the computer to find the numbers or dates corresponding to the subject matter. Even worse, pictures of the same subject matter will become scattered all over the files. For example, if you've made numerous trips to Yellowstone over the years and photographed moose, those moose pictures will become scattered throughout the files if you file by picture number or date, requiring a constant reference to the computer to find them. It's far better to have all the Yellowstone moose pictures in one easy to find file.
Much more logical are picture filing schemes that are either Subject specific or Geographic specific. This makes it easy to go to the file Moose, Yellowstone, Wyoming (Subject specific) or to Wyoming, Yellowstone, Moose (Geographic specific) to find certain moose pictures before consulting NSCS Pro 3.0 to find more obscure subjects. Keep in mind that no matter what kind of filing system you choose, it is still often necessary to use cross-referencing to find pictures. NSCS Pro 3.0 makes this easy to do.
For example, if you file by Subject and put all pictures of wildflowers in one file, that file could, in time, grow so large that it becomes unwieldy and time consuming to search. Then it becomes necessary to break the file into finer subdivisions - by geographic area, by family, etc. A file might contain the Subject heading Wildflowers, Rocky Mountains or, even more specific, Wildflowers, Colorado, Plains, and Wildflowers, Colorado, Mountains. If you choose to use a filing code (optional), a simple filing code for the last example might be: WF-CO-MTS. (Note that if you choose to use a filing code, you should keep it reasonably intuitive; WF for wildflowers, CO for Colorado, etc.)
If your picture files have a broad geographic diversity, you may wish to use a Geographic filing system, with finer subdivisions for subjects. For example, such a filing system might have Colorado, Mountains, Wildflowers as a sub-file under the Colorado file.
In the examples given, if you file all your wildflowers in one major grouping, you will still need to relate them to geographic areas and thus, in all probability, have geographic sub-files. If you file by geographic areas, you may have wildflowers in a number of different files. All can be found by using the cross-referencing built into NSCS Pro 3.0. You can sort or search under geographic areas, subject, filing code, or keyword descriptors.
If you set up your filing system for a stock photo business, keep in mind that photo requests are almost evenly divided between Geographic specific and Subject specific requests. You may be asked, for example, for coverage for an article on Colorado. That coverage might also include wildflowers of Colorado, as well as scenics and people. So you'll need to search your Wildflowers, Colorado file for those pictures of Colorado wildflowers if you set up your filing system for Subjects. The same would be true if, by filing by Subject, you had as a category Scenics, Mountains or Mountains. You would then need to search that file for the appropriate Colorado mountain pictures or scenics.
There is some advantage to using a Geographic specific filing system if you have - or expect to have - a wide diversity of geographic coverage. You can have sub-files containing specific items such as wildlfowers, mammals, insects, people, cities, etc. Using the search and sort capabilities of NSCS Pro 3.0 you can find where in your files certain subjects are located, even though they are filed under several geographic areas.
You are not limited to the pre-defined field names used in NSCS Pro 3.0. You may change the name of any or all of these fields and those changes will appear in all browse screens and forms.
Whatever system you finally choose, keep it simple. Do NOT file pictures by pre- defined numbered slots in slide sheets. This adds a heavy burden of labor to ensure that each picture gets back in its precise place. Imagine, if you will, that you've got several hundred pictures returned from submissions. Then think about how long it will take to put each picture back in a numbered slot in a specific slide sheet. It's far faster to go to a particular file and simply find a vacant slot in any slide sheet in that file. Can you find pictures quickly? Yes. Our files number nearly 400,000 slides and we can find a particular picture in a matter of minutes. Moreover, when filling picture requests you often need to browse through a number of pictures. ("Hmm, they asked for this picture, but maybe they'd also be interested in this one and this one and ...") KEEP IT SIMPLE.
Digital Files
Obviously you do not need filing cabinets for digital image files. Your computer hard drives become your filing cabinet. There are some important things to keep in mind when starting a digital filing system.
First, do NOT try to store large, high resolution images in any database (including the database of NSCS Pro 3.0). Even such powerful programs as Photoshop create thumbnails in their Image Browser to speed up loading and viewing images. Large image files will slow any database to a crawl. Using our outlined techniques, you can quickly create good quality but small file thumbnails that are stored in the database records. Moreover, each database record, in addition to having a thumbnail, has information about where to find the high res image corresponding to that thumbnail.
Second, have a scheme for storing the master high res images. Large capacity hard drives are cheap these days, but you can easily fill up such drives with thousands of high res images. For example, if you store your camera's images as TIFF files, a 5-megapixel camera creates a file about 15MB in size. A RAW file for the same 5-megapixel camera is about 8MB, meaning that you can store nearly 10,000 such images on an 80GB hard drive. Burning them onto CDs or DVDs is a good choice, but be sure that you label these disks properly to find images later. We recommend a filing system similar to that outlined above for slides. In other words, a particular CD or DVD might have sub-folders like Wyoming\Yellowstone\Moose and Wyoming\Yellowstone\FallScenics. You can label your CDs and DVDs with numbers or with descriptive notations such as Wyoming, Yellowstone.
Third, your thumbnail images that are put into NSCS Pro's database are stored on your hard drive. (Since thumbnails are relatively small jpegs, you can store great quantities; at an average of, say, 30KB size, you can store 50,000 thumbnails in about 1.5GB of hard disk space.) We recommend a hierarchical system for the thumbnails similar to the above system for high res. In other words, in an Images subfolder you can have subfolders by subject or by geographic area with further subfolders. NSCS Pro3.0 will still find your thumbnails no matter where they are stored.
Whether you are just getting started in digital photography or are experienced at it, we recommend Jeff Wignall's excellent book (just published by Lark Books) The Joy of Digital Photography. Jeff covers in good detail such topics as filing your digital images. This is an outstanding book covering a great many more topics. Link for it:
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