How do you organize/ view your digital assets?

[jdechko]

I have a side gig doing architectural rendering (3D modeling, artistic 2D sketches, etc) and I have quite a few digital assets. Everything from material swatches (color and bump/depth map), sky backgrounds, trees & bushes and people. All told, I have a few thousand different files that are mainly just sitting in the Finder.

What I need is some way to organize them similarly to the Photos app where they can be tagged, viewed and easily pulled into photoshop (if you know something handles sketchup components as well, that would be even better).

So what do you all use?

 

[organicCPU]

After Apple has been stopping Aperture development and Adobe went to subscription for Lightroom, DAM is in a really poor situation on Mac.

Organizing assets just in the Finder is still my preferred choice (Cmd + A, then Space or Alt + Space for viewing). The command line tool 'tag' by Brett Terpstra helps me with tagging. Exiftool helps with renaming, sorting, etc.

From time to time I run Adobe CS6 Bridge to get some different overview. Then there are the FOSS tools Digikam (DAM tool) and Darktable (particular a RAW converter) that can sometimes help organizing files.

Another solution also valid for offline media is NeoFinder, that I thought many times to give it a serious try. Other users are successful utilizing Extensis Portfolio, XnView, GraphicConverter or ON1 Photo RAW for their DAM needs.

I never worked with Sketchup files, but AFAIK Sketchup Pro should include a Quicklook Plugin that probably serves basic viewing functionality for other third-party DAM tools, too. Depending on your 3D app (or is it only Sketchup?) there might be integrated DAM solutions available, like Simple Asset Management (SAM) for Blender.

 

[WOODSEE_]

Adobe Bridge

 

[sigmadog]

I second WoodSee: Adobe Bridge, assuming you are using Adobe CC.

 

[jdechko]

Thanks. For the replies. I'm still using Photoshop CS5, as it does what I need it to do, even though it's pretty rough on High Sierra. I'd prefer not to move to CC, but I guess I'll look into Bridge for the time being.

 

[sigmadog]

Thanks. For the replies. I'm still using Photoshop CS5, as it does what I need it to do, even though it's pretty rough on High Sierra. I'd prefer not to move to CC, but I guess I'll look into Bridge for the time being.

There may indeed be other apps out there for organizing and tracking digital assets (I'm not that familiar with much beyond my little world), but Bridge seems to have an incredible amount of flexibility. Although if you aren't using / paying for Adobe Creative Cloud, then Bridge might not be a good deal given Adobe's confiscatory subscription plan.

I hesitate to recommend searching Apple's App Store because I'm seldom impressed by what is found there, but it might be worth a shot and, if you find something that works, it will likely be much cheaper than Adobe Bridge in the long run.

As an aside, I'm plugging along with Adobe CC on Sierra and as of yesterday all the new Adobe updates (just released) are incompatible with MacOs 10.12 Sierra. I'm pretty much locked in with Sierra for hardware reasons, so it's either ignore updates while continuing to pay, or get a new computer sooner than I planned. These are the choices you face when succumbing to Adobe's blandishments. Heh.

 

[weaztek]

I use Bridge (CC) and a standalone app called Photo Mechanic to sort and cull images. Photo Mechanic is the industry-standard for newspapers, magazines, and sports photography where captions/EXIF and filenaming conventions are essential. It is super fast at previewing lots of images at one time and they have a free trial version of the software that lasts a month.

Beyond that, I've always used a logical folder system to organize my assets. i.e. Mac HD > Pictures > Photo Flights > LA 2019 > Selects

 

[mollyc]

I use Bridge. It used to be free regardless of whether or not you had a subscription, and I think that is still true, but haven't checked for awhile as I do subscribe to Lightroom and PS.

 

[weaztek]

It's still free. https://prodesigntools.com/free-adobe-bridge-cc.html

But adjustments to images and batches of images are accomplished via ACR (Camera RAW) a component of Photoshop, so you can't do much if any editing to the files. If you're trying to steer clear of the Adobe ecosystem there are other alternatives.